Strange Aeons
by speaks
Summary: Adrien and Marinette are chosen by the spirits of creation and destruction-mortal enemies-and one of them is supposed to kill the other. So when they fall in love instead it's a recipe for disaster. Now the two of them must navigate through the toppling dominoes. Coffee dates and fashion shows, ashes and fireflies, funerals and weddings, life and death, and maybe some peace.
1. (Prologue) Nothing to Fear

Let's call this the melting pot of aus. Enemies au (kinda), human kwami au, modern day fantasy au, 'Adrien and Mari never met in lycee' au…

 **Optional author's note slash mental prep about the nature of this au:**

Here is a brief rundown, so you're prepared going in. After writing 'Untitled' in my one-shot collection ('Cross the River and Roam the Shore') I wanted to further explore that idea of their powers being more dynamic. So this story is my exploration of how could their powers could be if unrestricted by the limits of the show. (I mean, come on, their powers are literally _creation_ and _destruction_. You can do so much with that it physically pains me that the show cops out on that goldmine and makes their powers predictable and boring.) So yeah, their powers will be a LOT more complex here (read: less cartoony) and more reliant on the whole 'magic is real' aspect of it as opposed to unexplained/unquestioned existence of superheroes/villains. Think spirits instead of kwamis. Possession instead of miraculous stones and akumas. That's all I can tell you now without spoiling the plot; the rest will reveal itself as the story unfolds.

Also, closely related to the plot, Adrien never succeeded in his demands for public schooling. So, here at the beginning of this tale, he and Mari have thus far never met outside of costume.

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 **Nothing to Fear**

 **[Prologue]**

* * *

"That is not dead which can eternal lie,

and with strange aeons even death may die."

~H.P. Lovecraft

* * *

The Eiffel Tower was a sight to behold at night, but even moreso was the view from the top of it. The nearest metal leg dropped straight out below them for what looked like miles before curling away in a gentle parabola toward the place where it grounded one of the world's most famous man-made wonders to its home below. Ladybug and Chat Noir sat on an outcropped ledge about twenty meters from the very tip, where the nails were rusted from exposure and the finish was faded by time.

"You ever think about the fact that we're the first ones to have touched this particular place since the tower was built?"

It took some effort for Ladybug to tear her gaze from the sprawling city below. He was noisily finishing off his capri-sun (which she'd given him so much shit over when he shamelessly requested it because honestly, they were twenty-four now) and when he saw her looking, shot her a sly grin and disintegrated the empty foil pouch with a flash of searing light. Ladybug flinched, but only because without the usual dazzling array of light she used to disguise her civilian clothes (she usually dialed it back when they were alone together, all except her satin mask) it was rather dark this high above the city and her eyes weren't ready for that. _Not_ because he'd frightened her.

She could hear him snickering and pulled a face in his general direction. "Sorry," he laughed. "Seeing spots now, are you?"

"Maintenance workers come up here," Ladybug said in lieu of responding to the cheap play on the nickname the public had given her when she first appeared, and then finished off her can of cola, crushing it against their lofty perch. Chat stopped laughing. "Painters. The people who change the lightbulbs… And me, probably, when I rebuilt this tower with my bare hands. Should I go on or have your romantic notions been dashed already?" Having regained the use of her eyesight now, she batted her eyelashes at him devastatingly. It had the desired effect.

Humming low to himself, Chat leaned back onto his hands, kicking his legs as whimsically as if he were sitting at the edge of a shallow pond rather than a full seven-second drop above the city of Paris. The way the moonlight crested across a woman's cheeks was enough to fuel a man's heart for a dozen lifetimes. They two were no different. They may be the scions of incomprehensibly ancient powers, but they were more than that, and less. At the end of the day he was still just a man.

And she… she was a woman.

Said woman cocked her head at him in tentative curiosity, surprised that her eyelash tactic had so thoroughly succeeded in shutting him up.

"You should know by know," Chat Noir purred, voice deep and subdued with longing, "that I don't let go of romantic notions that easily."

So entranced was Ladybug by the fire in his eyes that she didn't see him reach for her. She sucked in a breath when his hand brushed her forearm, sliding slowly and purposefully toward her hand. Their eyes were still locked. Her lips parted in surprise. What was he...?

He plucked the crushed soda can from her hand, eyes crinkling in amusement. "May I?" he offered casually. Damn, he got her back. He knew exactly what was guilty of, too, judging by the smirk plastered on his insufferable face as he incinerated her trash the same way he had done his.

"Chat, stop," Ladybug sighed.

The hot ashes that had once been a can of Coca-Cola fluttered out of his open hand into the current of the lively wind. "Sorry," he repeated, this time more sincerely. "Did I hurt your eyes again?"

She shook her head; her heart was hammering against her sternum and it was only getting worse with him looking at her like that. _We're just partners,_ she reminded herself. _It doesn't matter what we've been in the past; we're only partners and that's all we'll ever be. So there's nothing to be worked up over, here. Nothing at all._ But as the silence stretched on and his ears pressed flat against his head in concern, her heart found plenty to get even further worked up over.

"Not that," she said, finally, through clenched teeth. "I meant…"

"Oh." She didn't have to say it; he knew what she meant. "Come on, Ladybug," he backpedaled clumsily, rubbing at the side of his neck, "I was just joking."

She shook her head again. "No, you weren't."

The careful monotone she said it in was impossible for him to decipher. "Alright then, you got me. I wasn't. What do you want me to say?" he sighed. "It's no secret how I feel about you."

"We can't play this game anymore," she sighed back. "You _know_ that."

"I wouldn't be so sure," he snorted, and rapped his knuckles on his head playfull. "If you asked Plagg, he'd assure you that I don't know anything."

"Chat Noir," Ladybug complained. "You just don't get it." Truthfully, it was her fault. She was the one who'd started it; she knew better than to flirt with him. What was she thinking, opening this Pandora's box again?

"It'd be easier to give it up if you, I don't know, actually turned me down," Chat hummed.

This argument was familiar ground. They'd been here before. They knew all the steps to this dance, and it always ended the same. So _why_ did he continue to invite her anyway? Ladybug wrinkled her nose at her partner like he'd lost his damn mind. "Are you kidding? I've turned you down more times than I can count! We _can't_ be anything, Chat. You _know that_ ㅡ"

"Can't," he pointed out, lazily. "See, you always say that. Can't. If you felt nothing for me you'd just say no." Heat blossomed on her cheeks at his words, changing them from silver to champagne-pink. Point: Chat.

"It doesn't matter either way," she fumed. "Tikki and Plagg have been at war for _centuries,_ Chat. They're too stubborn to change. And it's absurd to think we could ever have a chance of being happy together when we can never meet outside our transformations. It didn't work before and it never will. There's just too much at stake, and besides, I want you to be happy..." As she spoke, Chat tuned her out. He rolled his eyes and then his shoulders, cracking his neck and then moving on to a series of arm stretches. He knew this monologue of hers by heart. It felt faker every time like she was trying to convince herself more than she was trying to convince him. Because _seriously_. As if he wasn't agonizingly aware of their spirits' feud. She might as well inform him that the sky was blue and they lived in France. The fact that she was dutifully restating all of this meant they were nearing the end of their routine argument now, where she ended it without any hint that she still wanted him. Sure enough, she crossed her arms and finished the speech with: "So it's better to just relinquish whatever feelings you have left for me."

All done stretching, Chat leaned back on his hands again to survey Ladybug with a frown. His turn to reaffirm that his position on the subject hadn't changed and never would. "Who's to say Tikki and Plagg won't make up someday? Stranger things have happened. Like, you and me," he added softly.

Ladybug huffed and tucked a flyaway strand of hair back into her bun, refusing to meet his eye. He wondered if she was also recalling the day they met. The day he almost levelled the entire city of Paris. The day she almost killed him. The day she saved him instead.

The day he fell in love with her.

"Fine," he said with a great dramatic sigh when it was clear she was done speaking. "I'll concede, for tonight. But I _won't_ promise not to sweep you off your feet if I ever have the pleasure of running into you on the lovely streets of Paris." Grandiosely, he swept his hand out over the yawning void between them and the city belowㅡthe place they'd lived all their lives. The city of love. Looking at it he saw endless opportunity and, more importantly, he saw a future with her that he'd do just about anything to achieve.

But when Ladybug looked, she saw a dangerous, beautiful labyrinth laid out in silver and gold. A blind child she was tasked to protect. A deadly trap, if she didn't tread carefully.

"A city of over two million inhabitants. What makes you think you'd even recognize me if you saw me?" she trilled with amusement. "We might have even met before and never knew."

"Oh please," he murmured, and his voice was so raw that she froze in place. "You have to give me more credit than that, bugaboo. I'd know you in an instant."

And as she searched his face for somethingㅡ _anything_ ㅡto show he was bluffing, she found nothing. Nothing but honesty. And she realized, then, that if they ever met on the streets of Paris out of costume, they would be absolutely royally screwed. Because pitch black illusion or not, there was no way on Earth she could look into those radiant, hopeful, acid green eyes and not know they belonged to Chat Noir.

If they ever met as civilians they were fucked.

"What are you doing?" she said suddenly, torn from her thoughts when he touched the ledge between them with a finger and started to rust away the metal there.

"Have a little faith," he droned, squinting his eyes in concentration as he curved the line of rust. He was drawing something, she realized incredulously. "I haven't tried to destroy this tower in what, ten years? Huh. I guess we're about due for another attempt, then..."

"You shouldn't joke about that," she grumbled, then leaned over despite herself to see what he'd drawn. When she saw, she had to sigh. It was a little heart with LB and CN inside. Sometimes she swore he was still as old as the day they met. She crossed her arms, refusing to comment on the nature of his little drawing, like he had been no doubt hoping for by drawing it in the first place. "And you also shouldn't use your powers so frivolously."

"Maybe you should use yours _more_ frivolously," he answered.

"One of us has to take this job seriously," she replied haughtily as she rose to her feet. It was time to call it a night. They'd already been up here for far too long and tomorrow was the most important day of her career so far (her civilian career). Change of heart or not, if she was late for work tomorrow she would kill him. She would actually kill him.

"It's not a job," Chat shrugged, choosing not to take her cue to stand and instead settling back into his previous position of comfort. "No one's paying us to do this. There's no omniscient, omnipotent force that chose us for this. We didn't pull these swords out of magic stones. It's just, something that happened to us. And if I took my powers as seriously as you took yours," he finished guiltily, "then I'd have ended up`like all those other people that came before me. All the _other_ ones that Plagg's possessed."

Ladybug's stomach dropped out. "Chat, I didn't mean…"

"It's okay." He smiled up at her, and it hit her like a punch in the gut.

They'd been partners for so long that sometimes it was easy to forget what it had been like when they were enemies, however briefly. It was easy to forget that in his hands was a power deadly enough to bring this entire monument down in piles of burning rust, and instead he used it to do things like draw little hearts at their meeting spot. It was easy to take how _good_ he was for granted. Sometimes, in moments of clarity like this, she wondered: if Plagg hadn't chosen him that day all those years ago, would Tikki have chosen him one day herself?

"Hey," she put in, ruffling his blonde hair affectionately. "You know I…"

He leaned into her hand. "I know." She didn't have to say it; he knew what she meant.

"I'll see you tomorrow," she said, and with a flash of pink light a chunky backpack appeared on her back. With a wink she produced a matching one for him and tossed it into his waiting hands. With that done, she put her hand on the thin cord trailing out the bottom and stepped up to the edge where the tower met the open air.

"Good luck at your… whatever the important thing is that you're doing tomorrow." Chat clutched the backpack to his chest, wishing he could give her better wishes than that for this life-changing event she'd been talking circles around for weeks. Whatever it was she did for a living, he was sure she was the best around.

"Thank you, chaton." And she leapt into the night.

Chat watched her fall, and only leaned back when her parachute blossomed above her, drifting away toward the city far below on the whims of the breeze like she was no more than a dandelion seed.

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"Honestly," Plagg hissed, the second Adrien released him in a dark, secluded alley. The spirit made no attempt to keep quiet or out of sight, opting to flail his monochrome glowing arms this way and that as he complained. "You're using me to destroy _trash_ again? Come on, you can do better than that. What was it you were telling Ladybug back there? 'Due for another attempt?'" If possible, his solid black eyes seemed to darken, and he bared his teeth with glee. "I liked the sound of that, kid. Why don't you put your money where your mouth is?"

Despite the malicious intent, Adrien only rolled his eyes. Ten years now he had put up with the lanky, wispy demon that haunted him. "Littering is wrong," he whispered, peeking his head out of the black alley to make certain no one had seen him transform. Aside from a biker that was crossing at the nearest intersection, the street beyond was empty. "And you know I was kidding about that," Adrien added in exasperation. "I'm not like that, Plagg, and I never will be."

"Don't I know it more than anyone," the spirit drawled. "Ugh, if only I'd passed you up that day."

Adrien beamed at him sarcastically; after ten long years he had finally matched the apparition in height, so that now when they argued it was eye to eye. Although, looking into Plagg's charcoal black eyes, it was easy to imagine that Adrien was staring into nothing more than two bottomless black holes. Relatively human appearance or not, Plagg would always look like death to him. "But you didn't," Adrien prodded, "and you're stuck with me till the day I die. Sooner or later you're gonna have to accept that."

"I'll accept it when you're dead." Plagg flipped him off and vanished.

The walk home from here was short, but Adrien dithered, stopping at every other house to admire the gardens and the architecture, delaying the inevitable. It was almost two in the morning when he put his key in the front door of his flat. But his tactic had worked. In front of the dark window that overlooked the eastern half of the city, his angry black cat was already sound asleep, curled up in a ball of fluff and breathing softly in his sleep, tail flicking as he dreamt. The cat looked harmless.

But Adrien knew better.

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"You're letting him get too close again," Tikki scolded, the second Marinette released her halfway up the fire escape to her studio apartment.

Ghostly as she was, semi-transparent and glittering in a manner that put the urban night sky to shame, Tikki lit the secluded stairwell like a second moon. Shorter than Marinette but with sloping, generous curves and a matching bob haircut that was shockingly modern for a force of nature as old as time itself, she could never have been mistaken by any passerby as a regular human. The way she appeared now was purely for the benefit of being able to speak with Marinette. To give her the same lungs and vocal chords humans possessed in order to communicate. This humanlike apparition touched the full spectrum of the rainbow, catching the light every time she moved, like a shattered mirror floating through the vacuum of space. She was beautiful in that inexplicable way customary of surrealist paintings.

Frustration and concern twisted that beautiful face and drove her to cross her arms at her human conduit like a disapproving mother.

"I know what I'm doing," Marinette withered. Button-cute as she appeared, an angry Tikki was a force to be feared. "I trust him, Tikki."

"Well I don't. You're forgetting what he _did_ , Mari."

"I did not forget," Marinette snapped. How could she ever? "But it was one time and it's been _ten years_ since then. He has proven himself a thousand times over to be a good man, whether you see it or not."

The spirit of creation stepped toward Marinette, her eyes now softer and kinder, and placed one ethereal hand on her shoulder. "I know it seems that way. But Plagg has been using his conduits to terrorize humanity for almost four hundred years," Tikki insisted. "And _everyone_ he choosesㅡ"

"Maybe Plagg made a mistake this time." Marinette angrily shrugged her spirit off and resumed the climb to her apartment.

If she'd have turned back to look, she would have seen Tikki succumb briefly to an age-old sorrow, hugging her arms around her chest as she swept her eyes out over the sprawling modern metropolis. A glint of white flickered above the rail, and as she turned toward the light it manifested into a small cat that stalked silently along the railing of the fire escape. As it neared her it blossomed from within with colors that bled out behind it in the dark.

"Plagg doesn't make mistakes," Tikki whispered to the incorporeal cat. Cherry blossoms made of light sprinkled into existence around the apparition, spiraling downward on an imaginary breeze, and the cat lifted its nose to touch one as it fell. The cherry blossom vanished as soon as it connected. With a flick of her wrist Tikki made the cat disappear as well. _Plagg makes decisions, not mistakes._

 _Unlike me._

Up in her apartment, Marinette fussed about with last minute checks and preparations for her big day tomorrow. It was only as she was already in bed half-asleep that she suddenly remembered to water her plants, and got back up to stumble about in the darkness, filling her watering can before heading out to the balcony with a yawn. When she was almost finished, a little ladybug landed on her hand, flicking its wings as if in exasperation.

"I'm sorry," Marinette mumbled to it. "We're a team, Tikki, and we always have been. I know it hasn't been like that with your other chosen in the past." Marinette knew all about the past harbingers of destruction; had known of them for her whole life, had grown up studying them in school alongside her peers with morbid fascination and dissociated awe and fear. Everyone in the world knew about them. Murderers, arsonists, terrorists, all of them.

All except Chat Noir.

"But Chat is…" Marinette set down her watering can and gently touched a wilting blossom sprouting from amidst her daisies. They were by far the plainest flowers in her garden, but they were special to her because _he_ had gifted her the seeds. "He's different," she said for what felt like the ten millionth time since she'd partnered up with the man who by all accounts should have been her enemy. The ladybug flapped its wings again. "Plagg may be the spirit of destruction, but he picked the wrong guy for his agenda this time around. Plagg might want us dead but _Chat Noir_ would never hurt us. So if we never meet outside of costume and Plagg never finds us, well then, we have nothing to fear. Do we?"

The ladybug only flapped its wings again. Amazing how much disapproval and exasperation a simple flap of the wings could convey.

Reaching into that warm fountain of energy deep inside her heart, Marinette touched the dying daisy with her index finger, letting loose a little of that magic that pulsed in her veins, tethering Tikki to the physical plane. Slowly but surely the white petals perked up, water and sugar pouring in fast-motion into its little cells. A few minutes later Marinette fell asleep with a smile on her face. It may have been just a single little flower, but to her, no one and nothing was beyond saving.

That night she slipped into an old recurring dream she'd had about once month since she was fourteen years old.

A lonely, furious, desperate child with a black hole for a face, who wanted her city to fall. Rubble and flame carried her through the night. In her bed, she tossed. A knife to his throat, flat on his back at the edge of a rooftop. Her hands shook.

 _Do it_ , he whispered. The first words he ever spoke to her. Startlingly green eyes broke free from the darkness that clung to his skin like ink, veiling him, swallowing him, eating the light of day. A ring of sunny hazel hugged the middle of each irisㅡtwo tiny rays of humanityㅡand as she looked they filled with tears.

 _Please,_ he begged, _just do it._

But she didn't.

* * *

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First, I'd like to give a shout out to _knightsweeties_ on tumblr for the physical appearance of human form Plagg and human form Tikki. Besides the whole 'ghostly spirits' part heheh. Other than the fact that they behave very much like ghosts here, physically, I've imagined them to look almost exactly like her drawings of them. Check out her art at tagged/human!kwami-au. :) Thanks to her!

Second, this is gonna be kind of a long story. Yes I will delve more into their past and how they met and WHAT exactly happened that day. Cause I know y'all are wondering what the FUcking fuck Adrien did on his first day as Chat Noir to warrant Ladybug almost killing him… ;) ;) ;) Do not worry. Speaks will deliver. "WOAH, but that's out of character for both of them!" you say. "I totally agree!" I say back. You might want to just wait for a little further explanation on the whole 'spirits' thing before jumping to any conclusions. This story is going to be rather high on the drama/violence/sexual content scale, so if you're not into that you may want to check out now. Rating won't be bumped up till I find it necessary.

Also, eyyy, I'm a huge Plagg fan! He is kind of an asshole and a half in this fic but you might be surprised to hear he's actually not meant to be the antagonist. You'll understand him a little more later on. It's all part of the plot.

Till next time,

xoxo


	2. Eye Contact

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* * *

 **[Eye Contact]**

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Despite having been prepared for this day for two weeks, Marinette launched herself out of bed the instant her eyes fluttered open, skidding on a stray bobbin on her way to the Serious Yet Lovely™ dress she'd laid out on her vanity the night before. It wasn't until she was brushing her teeth while simultaneously trying to put the dress on that her sleep-addled brain remembered the photoshoot wasn't until 11:00am. She leaned out of the bathroom to glance at the oven clock.

6:41am.

She wilted. The toothbrush fell out of her mouth.

At any rate, she had a bit of time to slow down and breathe deeply as she mentally prepared herself for the day. The only last minute change she made to her methodical plan was to take off the pink flats she'd picked to match her grey sundress (a modest flowy number with flowy sleeves to match) and replace them with her black converse shoes. Sneakers with a dress wasn't normally her style, but today, it just felt right. Down on the street below her studio apartment, the cabby helped her stuff all her bags into the car, responding with amicable amusement when she frantically reminded him to lay them all perfectly straight or her life was over. With all the garment bags laid out flat or hung up over the back seat, Marinette slid into the front, careful to keep her dress from wrinkling up underneath her.

"Big day?" the young driver asked, his eyes crinkled at the corners.

"Oh yes," Marinette breathed. Hell yes. She felt like she was going to pass out from the excitement. "I'm sorry, I'm normally not this fussy."

All the way over to the address she'd been emailed two weeks ago, Marinette stared at the succulents and wildflowers she'd embroidered onto the sides of her shoes, complete with her usual hidden signature near each heel. Nervous as she was, she knew that she deserved this. Her entire life's work so far had been leading up to this crossroad. The photographer's apartment was even ritzier than she'd imagined; although she only got a brief, dazzled glimpse of it all as his assistant answered the door and led her to the roof. Abstract paintings taller than her lined the walls in odd places, and sharp jagged architecture sculpted the interior into something of an Escher-style dreamland. The assistant pointed out an assortment of crackers and cheese and teacups on a coffee table next to the whitest couch Marinette had ever seen, where a few of the models were currently waiting. She urged Marinette to help herself as well, since the shoot would last for around three hours.

"As long as the planets are aligned," the assistant tacked on with a smirk.

 _If ever the planets were aligned,_ Marinette thought to herself, _it's today._

Watching the photographer work was a learning experience in itself. While she'd had pictures of all her clothes taken before for her website, they'd been done for free by Alya, and the models had always been generous friends from her university classes. This was nothing like those fun afternoon hangouts, where Marinette's friends had pillaged her fridge and she'd fawned over how beautiful they all looked in her clothes while Alya tried to figure out how to use her new DXL camera. This was the big league. When she'd first been approached by Converse to clothe their models in an upcoming ad, she'd understood that it was a relatively small job by the industry's standards. It was like being asked to play a song at a wedding. It didn't mean she was a star; it was just a one time deal. Still, it was the biggest player she'd ever been approached by, and something in her gut told her that this was a turning point for her tiny unassuming shop. It was publicity. And they were _paying her._

At first she'd been surprised to learn that the photoshoot would be at the photographer's own apartment. Dennis McCorkle was his name, and once Marinette stepped out onto the rooftop terrace, she was no longer surprised. This place was a garden utopia. Lush bushes dotted with exotic breeds of flowers poured out of every surface, and against the northern end stood a picket fence archway threaded with vines. With the unmarred cerulean sky serving as a background, the set was flawless. It could have been a digitally rendered painting, and Mari could have cried at the perfection of it all.

But after she got the models into the clothes she'd selected using the size chart the Converse rep sent her, and the shoot began, the day took a definitive nosedive. Dennis was a bonafide sweetheart, but the models…

It wasn't that they sucked. Or were mean. (Well, besides that one blonde girl that kept snapping at everyone between takes.) They all seemed talented, but didn't seem to click with each other. Unfortunately, Converse ads were almost never solo modeling ventures. The group photos came firstㅡwherein Dennis herded all five models into cute, wacky setups around the terrace. But only twenty minutes in they fell to bickering, and soon Dennis split them into smaller groups, where the chemistry was heinously out of whack, obvious even to Marinette who was by no means a photographer. The young designer groaned at every little mistake, running in every once in awhile to adjust a collar or reroll a sleeve after the models had finished rolling their eyes at one another's slip-ups.

About two grueling hours in, Dennis gave three of the models the greenlight to take off, irritated at the lack of motivation or cohesion and pinning all his hopes on the remaining two, who he was more familiar with: a tall muscled guy wearing a jacket/hat combo that she'd slaved over for months to perfect, and the loudmouthed blonde wearing an off the shoulder blouse and some ripped jeans from Marinette's earliest collection.

But it was clear even this last resort was not working. Another half hour of forced shots later, the guy stepped on the girl's foot and she swore loudly, shoving him so hard he almost knocked over the archway.

"God dammit, Chloe," Jean spat. "It was an accident!"

Chloe was the lanky blonde, her hair done up in a ponytail so tight that it was no wonder she had been pissy all morning, and she'd made sure they all knew how little she wanted to be here from the start. The two models fell to bickering for the umpteenth time, and Dennis lowered his camera, turning to Marinette to mirror her exasperation and disdain.

He swiped a hand through his curly salt and pepper hair. "Fun in the sun, eh?" Dennis cackled to Marinette in his thick irish accent. "Bummer this had to be your first day on a big set, dear."

Just then, the pencil skirt assistant reemerged onto the terrace and leaned in to whisper something in Dennis's ear.

"Well, tell them this is a closed set," Dennis snapped quietly. "They can give Chloe her coffee after we're done shooting."

After a moment of internal deliberation, the assistant leaned back in and whispered two short words. They were too soft for Marinette to hear, but she watched with fascination as Dennis's tired eyes lit up with fresh energy, as if he'd just downed a triple shot espresso.

"Is that right?" he trilled. "Why didn't you say so in the first place? Take five!" he shouted to everyone, abruptly ending the two models' heated argument.

" _Again?_ " Jean complained. "You've gotta beㅡ" He watched with gobsmacked incredulity as Chloe sat down on the ledge beneath the archway and immediately pulled out her phone to text someone. "Okay," he seethed. "That's it. I'm through! We've been here _two hours_ and we're not even halfway done. You are insufferable, Chloe! This is the absolute _last_ time I'm working with your spoiled ass."

"No, no!" Marinette shouted, pushing past the studio lights onto the set to intercept him. "Please, I really need this to work out and it won't if you leave. We'll just hurry through the last hour, okay?" But he brushed straight past her with an indignant huff. Nothing else she said was to any avail and so, fighting back tears, Marinette retreated to the wooden bench where she'd set up camp since arriving and slumped forward to cradle her head in her hands. Marinette's dream shoot had started out in the clouds but immediately spiralled down into flaming wreckage. Would the whole thing be scrapped? Was her dream in shambles?

"Sorry Dennis," Jean shrugged.

Dennis only glowered at him as he passed. "That's fine," he chirped back. "I have a perfectly timed replacement." Jean gave him a confused eyebrow quirk, but understood when he opened the door to the staircase that led back downstairs.

Coffee in one hand and a dog-eared book in the other, Adrien Agreste waved as best he could manage, giving Jean a genial smile. He was pretty sure he remembered working with this guy at some point, though he couldn't remember his name.

Jean only rolled his eyes, recognizing Adrien straight away. "Great," he sassed, and nudged past Adrien onto the staircase. "Have fun with the self-appointed queen of Paris."

Adrien watched him go, torn between confusion and annoyance. What was all that? Before he could locate Chloe to give her the coffee she'd begged for over the course of fifteen texts when she'd realized he was in the vicinity of Dennis's uptown flat, he was assaulted by his old friend Dennis McCorkle.

"Adrien!" Dennis greeted him with the same old delight he always had, even though it had been a few years now since they'd last met. "Adrien, Adrien, here to save the day as usual. Please, salvage my photoshoot, will you? Show the plebeians how it's done."

Even though he was the shorter of the two, Dennis managed to get his arm around Adrien's broad shoulders in order to steer him across the garden toward the cameras and equipment. Hot coffee sloshed out of the foamy latte onto Adrien's hand. "Nice to see you too," he laughed. "Look, you know I love you but you also know that I quit years ago. I'm not interested in being in a shoot, Den. I'm just here to bring Chlo some coffee."

"Hey hot stuff," Chloe called out on cue without looking up from her page-long-and-still-growing text message. "Hang on, I'll be over to get that in a minute. You're the best!"

"I know," Dennis lamented over Adrien's retirement, ignoring the loudmouthed Chloe. "The tragedy; it keeps me up at night!"

Adrien flushed. For a once-prolific model, he'd never been very good at taking compliments. "Dennis."

"I joke," Dennis relented, and went on in a far less grandiose tone. "But please, kid, I'm asking this as a friend, not as a colleague. This girl hereㅡlook," he said, pointing to Marinette across the meandering garden where she sat dejected and alone on the bench, face in her hands. "This is her first big time shoot with a big name brand. She's got an amazing one man show thing going on with her own online clothes store, and she's just sweet as pie. But she's relatively unknown, see? So her whole trajectory is banking on this lucky deal with Converse working out. We're four models short now that Chloe scared off Jean, and two seconds from scrapping the whole shoot. You could be the difference between a lifetime of obscurity for this girl's brand, and a legacy as big as your father's."

The rest of the speech hadn't even been necessary; Adrien had been sold at "this girl here," when he'd spotted the devastated designer with her head in her hands at the end of the cobblestone walkway. Adrien frowned. They were almost to the bench where she sat now, and Adrien cleared his throat, setting his book and the coffee on the foldout work table next to her, a healthy distance from the cords and equipment.

"Hi," he offered warmly.

He hadn't modeled in almost five years now, and had never planned on it again. But this girl… The way she was drooped over on herself was breaking his heart. If it meant fixing that, Adrien would jump into shark tank wearing a suit of raw steaks. He could stomach one last photoshoot for her. Registering the two men now standing directly in front of her, the girl hastily wiped at her eyes, flattened her dress out a little on her lap, and then stoodㅡraising her head as she went with dignity.

Their eyes met, and time stopped.

 _You?_

So startled was Marinette to see _those_ _eyes_ in _this_ _place_ that the disaster of a photoshoot might as well have been a long forgotten dream. Each acid green with a ring of yellow fire, and those familiar eyes blinked in abject shock. If Adrien had still been holding that coffee or his book he would have accidentally disintegrated them now in a blaze of fire. In the designer's eyes were two stained glass seas that he'd have recognized anywhere, even if he went colorblind. It may have felt like several strange aeons that they stood spellbound by each other in the golden afternoon, but in reality it only took one second for the spark to jump from the question mark to the periodㅡfor their madly fluttering hearts to find footing on a life-shattering truth.

 _You._

"Hi," Marinette echoedㅡhis greeting from an eternity ago. What else could she say?

Looking back and forth between the two awestruck young adults, Dennis couldn't control his glee. "What's all this, then?" he wondered. "Know each other already, do you?"

"What? No!" Marinette floundered, while Adrien jump-started back to life in order to gesture at the photographer in frantic denial.

Dennis didn't seem to buy that, so Adrien cleared his throat again (using his vocal chords was suddenly a monumental task) and offered a distraction. "I'll do the shoot."

Clapping his hands together under his chin, Dennis bounced in place. "Magnifique!" he cried. Then he rounded on Marinette, who was doing all she could to maintain composure and not succumb to an immediate heart attack. "You know who this _is_ , right honey?" Marinette choked on her own saliva, the words _Chat Noir_ halting at the tip of her tongue. "That's right," Dennis hummed, unaware of Marinette's ever-rising panic. "Who better to slingshot your brand into the spotlight than the son of Gabriel Agreste?"

Oh.

 _Oh_.

Clumsily pushing her bangs out of her eyes, Marinette offered out one quivering hand to shake his. "Nice to meet you, Adrien," she said, but her soul was screaming out _nice to meet you,_ _Chat_. "Marinette Dupain-Cheng."

"Marinette," Adrien repeated, softly and meaningfully. Like a vow. _Ladybug_. When he took her hand he was so enraptured by the paralyzed look on her face that he forgot he was supposed to be shaking it. Instead he just held it, perhaps a tad too tightly, heart fighting free of his ribcage, stomach making friends with the street three stories below.

To the left, Dennis McCorkle stood with both hands still clasped piously beneath his chin, watching this fascinating interaction unfold with the shameless eyes of an artist. 'Never met before' his _ass_. This was the most sexually charged handshake he had ever seen in his entire life, and he spent his free nights at the sort of clubs where CEOs shook hands with strippers. "Oh my god," he groaned under his breath. "This is too perfect." Without turning around, he raised his voice to add, "Chloe, honey, you're fired."

"What?" The incredulous 'what' came from Marinette, Adrien, and Chloe all at once. "Are you serious?" Chloe screeched. "After all this time in the sun? I put on _sunscreen_ for this, Dennis."

"Relax," Dennis soothed, "you'll still get paid. Just go take a big fat relaxing day off, okay? We're done here."

Marinette's jaw flapped, devastation returning full force. "But what aboutㅡ" She couldn't finish, as Dennis took her by the hand and begun to tug her unceremoniously across the rooftop toward the staircase. "Where are we going? What is happening?"

"Shh, Mari, just follow me to makeup. We're saving your photoshoot, that's what we're doing."

"Makeup?" Marinette shrieked, and in his place by the bench Adrien had to clutch his heart. Holy shit, it was _seriously her. He wasn't imagining things. It was her._ "Nooo," Mari protested, "no no no, not me, what are you talking about? I can't!"

"I'm talking about you and Adrien and that instant chemistry," he hummed over his shoulder at her. "My horoscope said I'd have a meeting with lady luck today. Normally it's all bullshit, but now? Heh! I'm starting to wonder, y'know?"

"You don't understand," Marinette whined. "I _can't_." She knew she sounded like a child, but the prospect of going through with what Dennis was suggesting was absolutely terrifying. Modeling with a professional for a professional photographer? Her nerves could probably (maybe) handle that on a good day. After all, she'd modeled more than a few of her own pieces for her website. Modeling with Chat Noir two seconds after accidentally discovering his civilian identity? Fuck that all the way to China. She wouldn't survive. So reluctant was she to follow Dennis back into the apartment that she almost fell over backwards when he let go of her hand.

"Listen up," Dennis barked at her, and Marinette jumped in her skin. Even throughout the frustration of the shoot with the models' constant arguing, she'd never seen him look so serious as he did in this moment. "I am the photographer and what is happening right now is _magic_. You will learn as you progress in this industry, you sweet summer child, that you do _not_ pass up these blue moons when they unravel before you like fresh woven silk. Look at you, you came so prepared." Examining the eyeliner wings off the corners of her eyes, he wrinkled his nose in appreciation. "You hardly need but a touch-up. Downstairs," he commanded, ripping the door open and pointing inside. "Now."

Marinette wilted under his ferocious gaze. Down the stairs she went.

Over by the work table, Chloe was sipping on her coffee and eyeing her flustered childhood friend with a degree of amusement. She'd never seen him act this way over a girl before. "You're seriously gonna have that designer model her own clothes?" she asked as Dennis returned.

"Are you kidding?" Dennis deadpanned at her, dropping to his knees to sift through the piles of shoes Converse had sent over, looking for Adrien's size. "I'm pretty sure the sparks were hitting you way over by the arch, Chloe. You can't tell me you didn't get a little singed. Perfect, I thought I saw a size eleven in here. The red does so nicely against the rich green background." He lifted a crisp, fresh off the conveyer belt pair of shoes from the bottom, too engrossed in his task to see how close Adrien's complexion had come in the meantime to matching the firetruck shade that Dennis had selected. "Besides," Dennis tacked on, "the two o' you look like frickin' Lannisters. It's in poor taste."

"That's fair," Chloe laughed, and reached over to ruffle Adrien's hair. The 'twins' thing had been a running joke between them since they were kids and on more than one occasion they'd managed to convince people of its veracity. Their record was with another photographer named Fionaㅡas far as they knew, she still believed it to this day.

"Oi, hands off the merchandise," Dennis scolded, shooing away Chloe as he handed Adrien the shoes he would wear for the duration of the photoshoot. "Now go trade off with Marinette so she can pick out your clothes."

They passed each other on the stairs as he descended and she drifted back up. _Don't look,_ Marinette thought, but in the end there was nothing she could do to stop herself. Something flickered between them when they caught each other's eyes. Something sharp and unspoken. And then it passed, and Adrien sat numb on a stool in the kitchen as the makeup artist danced around him, and Marinette stood in front of the rack that housed the clothes she'd brought for the other models, trying to decide which ensemble would fit Chat Noir.

Chat Noir, the _son of Gabriel Agreste._

Holy fucking shit. She had to sit down for a moment, abandoning the clothes rack as it all washed over her afresh. How had she never seen him before? She'd read his name a thousand times, in various biographies about her personal hero, the head of the largest fashion empire in modern France. If she'd taken just a single moment's interest in the models that were _wearing_ the clothes she so desperately devoured like the growing artist she was, perhaps she'd have realized years ago. Perhaps she could have given up on her career way back then so as to avoid the natural disaster opening beneath her feet like a bottomless pit.

"Um… Are those for me?"

Marinette snapped to attention. Adrien was standing in front of her at a cautionary distance, avoiding her eyes, one hand half-covering his face in derelict confusion. Honestly, what was he supposed to do in this situation? He was playing with hellfire here but he wasn't about to just leave her on her own. It was his job to protect her; that's what he'd always done and that's what he'd always do, even now that everything was about to change. And everything _would_ change. He knew, as he took his clothes behind the foldout dividers, that nothing would ever be the same again, because the mysterious, elusive, love of his life was suddenly a name and a face and _lord have mercy, she works in the same industry as me._

Yes, everything was about to change.

For better or for worse? Now that was the question burning holes in his lungs, and as he reemerged wearing her impressive designs, he thought he saw the same question hanging over her head like a thundercloud.

"This just keeps getting better and better," Dennis was saying. He was currently crouched at Marinette's feet, touching the intricate embroidery on her black Converse with a sparkle in his eye. "Don't bother with the ones I brought you from the pile. Leave these ones on, will you?"

"Butㅡbut I altered them." Marinette strained around backward to follow Dennis with her eyes as he crawled around to look at pattern on the other shoe. "Is that ok? This is an ad for _their_ product."

"Trust me on this one," Dennis hummed. "Leave these on. Besides, you obviously picked them out to match this trout colored dress of yours. Lovely choice, honey, it'll clash marvelously with Adrien's red shoes and that button-up you put him in."

"Uh.. clash?"

"Don't ask questions," he replied cheerily.

It was strange, this tonal shift of his. Perhaps the Dennis from earlier was all show, and only now was she seeing the _real_ Dennis at work. All too soon Adrien was finished changing and Dennis was ushering them both toward the archway, reminding them they only had about fifteen minutes left to work with before his next engagement was scheduled. "But if our luck continues," he chuckled, "we'll only need ten. Adrien, help her along, will you? Just freestyle. I've already hit all the major compositions Converse asked for, so we're free to do whatever."

Marinette stared so hard at Adrien's feet that if her eyes were lasers his shoes would probably be on fire. Hands clasped together in front of her, she eyed Dennis. "Freestyle?"

"It means we improvise," Adrien answered, one hand combing nervously through his hair. "Interact with the set, and uh… each other. Don't worry, I'll walk you through it, okay?" It would have been the polite thing to do if he'd really been a stranger. But it was Chat, and she was almost positive he knew she was Ladybug, so what was he really saying then? _Trust me like always_. She wondered then, would he come right out and air the obvious?

Marinette jumped as the camera flashed.

"Nice. Remember, this is _Converse_ , Adrien," Dennis emphasized. "Cheesy young romance and all that coming of age junk. Heart eyes. You get it."

"Yeah, I get it," Adrien grumbled, and if Marinette wasn't mistaken he looked even more flustered than she was. "It helps if we talk," Adrien said to her. "Makes it look more natural." He quailed at the terrified look on her face, wondering if she would have preferred her big day go down in flames than he turn up in her life like this. "Or uhㅡwe don't have to talk," he floundered. Jesus, he hardly dared to hope he'd ever meet her, and he certainly never thought they'd have an audience if it ever happened. "Let's just walk, okay?" Timidly he took her hand, leading her away from the arch down one of the long winding paths through the flowers, trying to shut out the light of the camera flash as Dennis followed them.

"I'm sorry," Marinette squeaked. "I'm justㅡI'm nervous." That much was true, and it was all she could safely admit without exposing the scary truth. That she knew. That she knew he knew.

Peering sideways down at her, Adrien realized just how scared she actually was. And he had a feeling she wasn't camera shy. Guilt lapped at his heart; he was supposed to help her, not scare the shit out of her by accidentally ambushing her on the biggest day of her career. She'd been gushing to him for weeks about this (in that vague, nonspecific way they talked about their personal lives) on their patrols and now he had been handed a golden chance to help her not only in the battlefield but in her personal life as well. He would not squander it. Time to take a huge gamble.

He stopped at the far end of the terrace, where the rooftop ended with a sheer drop to the street below and the wealthy penthouse suites level with them across the way stood as a backdrop, the sound of smooth French jazz drifting out from an open doorway on the balcony halfway up the parallel building. Adrien turned to Ladybug ( _Marinette,_ he thought incredulously) and rested his hands gently on her shoulders. "Listen," he said quietly. The words were for her and no one else. "Ads like this are all about acting and getting into the moment. Just pretend that I'm... someone you love," he ended cryptically. He wouldn't pretend he wasn't hoping she still loved him as madly as he loved her. "Forget about the camera. It doesn't exist. It's just you andㅡand whoever you want me to be."

That finally drew Marinette's eyes from their grip on his shoes. She peeked up at him with a slight furrow in her brow. A burning question. _She knows it's me,_ he realized. Adrien's mouth went dry and the rest of his pep talk fell out the back of his head.

"Magnifique!" Dennis crowed for the second time that afternoon, and the camera flashed thrice in quick succession. "Now kiss her."

"Dennis!" Adrien snapped, heart going wild, though more from that intense moment of eye contact than from Dennis's blunt directions. He'd always been fairly sure that Plagg was going to be the one to get him killed, but now, he was starting to think the words 'eye contact' would end up somewhere on his headstone. "It's her first shoot!"

"I-it's okay," Marinette managed. "If Dennis says so, then who am I to turn up my nose?" She tried to laugh off the nerves. Despite the multifaceted disaster of this rendezvous, she did really need this shoot to work out, and she wasn't about to argue with the accomplished photographer just because she had the world's most complicated history with the model in question. She'd kissed him before. She could do it one more time without opening the floodgates, right?

Right?

As he turned back toward her with softened eyes, he wondered what was going through her head. What he wouldn't give to be alone with her right now. "If you say so," he said. "Just remember…" He brushed her hair from her face, the other hand coming to rest at her hip closest to Dennis. "Forget about the camera."

Done and done. When his nose brushed hers she would have been hard pressed to even remember her own name. She rose onto her toes, dress flapping in the high summer breeze. His bangs tickled her forehead and she closed her eyes, thinking of the last time they kissedㅡalmost four years ago. They were so young then, and naive, and oh so stupid… Her hands came to rest on his chest and he sighed, thinking of the exact same thing she was, his breath caressing her skin far more gently than any breeze.

Their lips had _almost_ connected when the camera abruptly stopped flashing.

"Okay, that's a wrap," Dennis called out. "That's _all_ I need, kids." They untangled themselves with comic ineptitude, with limbs carved of molasses. Adrien couldn't help glaring at Dennis. He knew the man well, and he knew when he was being purposely screwed with. But Dennis pretended not to notice.

"Is that really it?" Marinette wondered. It can't have been more than eight or nine minutes since Adrien emerged from behind the dividers.

"Great, are you done?" Chloe shouted, and Adrien was surprised to realize that Chloe had never actually left, having instead taken up residence on Marinette's workbench with her coffee. "Nathalie is blowing up my phone looking for you."

Adrien pulled his sleeve up to check his watch, and hit Marinette with an apologetic gaze. "Looks like I'm late," he laughed. He held his hand out tentatively before taking leave of the rooftop. "It was nice to meet you, Marinette."

She shook it silently.

Once he was gone and Marinette was left to sort through her emotions and gather her supplies, Chloe sauntered by to tower over her (goodness, she was tall) and fold her arms with an odd expression that was very different from the resting bitchface Marinette had come to know so well over the last few hours. Amusement and pity fought for control of her facial muscles. "Don't even think about it," Chloe said.

Marinette struggled to avoid her, moving this way and that to continue packing up her things. "About what?" she replied absently.

"Him." She said it while staring at her nails. Honestly, the people next door could have seen the hopes in the young designer's eyes. Chloe wasn't in the business of doling out charity for the poor and downtrodden, but she wasn't cruel. It felt cruel to leave without saying anything.

"Him?" Marinette choked, almost dropping the garment bag she was currently stuffing a dress into. How transparent was she? Was it seriously that obvious? "Come on, I don't even know him!" she laughed nervously. _That's right, Marinette, play it off. Just play it off._ "Why?" she wondered suddenly, a horrific thought occurring to her. "Are you dating?" _No, I said play it off, you idiot!_

"What?" Chloe answered, her lip curling in surprise and bemusement. "No," she laughed; a short derisive bark. It occurred to Marinette that _this_ must be Chat's imfamous best friend. "No way. Adrien doesn't date, that's why I'm saying this. Like, at all," she emphasized. "Anyone. Ever. So you should spare yourself the heartache and just forget about him. Been there, cried over that, all that jazz. That guy's heart is a closed door. You ask me, I'm pretty sure he's had a secret lover of some kind hidden away from the world for like ten years."

"Oh," she said, and it was all she could do to keep the tears that had just sprung into her eyes from breaking free. She had just spotted Adrien on the street below, and as she watched him wave down a taxi he paused and looked up. Right at her.

"Secret lover," Chloe echoed at her side, waving down at Adrien. A taxi screeched to a stop in front of him and Adrien hesitated with one hand on the door handle before waving back.

Marinette's hand went to her heart, unbidden.

 _It's me._

* * *

.

.

I know the whole 'Marinette gets roped into a shoot with Adrien' thing is kind of a trope in this fandom, but by jove I needed it. Forgive me. Also, yeah I sort of kidnapped Chloe and put her somewhere else for this fic. She's just a model here and not the mayor's daughter.

EYYY are you starting to wonder what the hecking heck is up with Lady and Chat's complicated history? Great, me too! I mean, uh, buckle up for the next installment. The mystery unfolds… (Also, tentatively, this fic will be around 16 chapters. Longest fic I've ever embarked on so wish me luck and give me encouragement if you want more.)

wink wonk ;)


	3. The Reaper

In which we break Adrien.

I uh… I cried a little bit while writing this chapter you guys. Please forgive my sin. (My phone autocorrected that initially to 'please forgive my son,' and honestly, that is just as poignant...)

* * *

 **[The Reaper]**

* * *

 _(Ten years ago… )_

* * *

Adrien was a wallflower at his own mother's wake.

All his life he'd been trained to mingle and mix and act the part of the tycoon's son. Day in and day out he would clink his glass with his father's associates and their children and keep his silver spoons just as shiny as everyone else's. But not today. It had only been two days since his mother's shockingly abrupt departure and he could not have acted the part if he tried. Today he wasn't the blooming prodigy or the well-mannered son. He was nothing.

The funeral had dragged him along in its aching crawl; there Adrien was forced to listen to the priest drone on about someone he'd never met, waxing philosophical about life beyond death and quoting famous poets he wasn't sure his mother would have even liked. She was never that into poetry. Adrien never got to speak. He was relegated to the audience where he was forced to take part in the event as a passive observer with all the others. Every distant relative or business associate that had ever brushed shoulders with the Agrestes were here en masse, milling now through the vaulted ground floor hall of the family mansion, where they sipped champagne and chatted in hushed voices like it was some kind of party. If his father had bothered to ask for his input, Adrien would have insisted that his best friend was invited for moral support, but he wasn't, so since his father had never cared much for Chloe, the only person that might have stood by him without pretending to care how he felt wasn't here.

Near the corridor that led away to the south wing, Adrien stood leaning against the painted wall, exhausted from sleep deprivation and virtually dead to the world. Already he'd been sent to see a therapist about the insomnia, even though the only person he wanted to talk to was his father. The therapist emphasized that he might feel numb about it all at first, in this surreal stage where his mother lay in an open casket at the end of the room farthest from him, not yet in the ground. But he didn't feel numb. He felt fuller than he ever had in his life. Grief stood in the foreground, casting everything else in fraught plague-like shadowsㅡthe indescribable grief, the infinite loss of his dearest confidante, his closest friend, his everything. His mother. The worst part was that despite the therapist's warnings of denial, there was nothing surreal about this to him at all. It was all painfully acute and _real_ and he'd been awake for it all, for two straight days. He'd welcome denial with open arms at this point.

And underneath that plague of grief? Roaring under it like a bonfire was the most intense level of anger he had felt in his fourteen years of life.

An elderly couple passing by stopped to offer their condolences to him. He hardly heard them. The words were all the same, and he didn't recognize their faces. They may as well have been strangers. The man patted his shoulder and the woman tustled his hair, and they seemed well-meaning, yet he couldn't muster up the decency to thank them or even acknowledge their presence. The two gave each other an awkward look at Adrien's apathy and ambled away to some other social circle. That was fine by him. He was alone over here by choice.

All these people. Three or four hundred of them, it looked like. How many of them actually _knew_ Jacqueline?

Not the Jacqueline that got dressed up for dinner parties or wore that Mona Lisa smile next to her husband at fashion shows. Not the Jacqueline she painted on her face in the mornings and presented with charm and grace to his father's work associates. He wanted to know who else here was mourning the Jacqueline who taught him to play the piano. The one who laughed so hard at his jokes she would sometimes snort, even in public where anyone could hear. The real Jacqueline. Adrien scowled so hard at another stranger making his way over that the man changed his mind at the last minute and switched directions. Adrien was willing to stake his life that no one here knew her anywhere near as well as he did, or loved her half as much. Not even his father.

Gabriel Agreste stood near the casket on the opposite end of the hall, looking as pristine as ever in his top of the line suit, somehow playing the part even when the world as he knew it had ended. How he stood there so cool and collected in the face of utter calamity was beyond Adrien, who had overheard his father sobbing behind a closed door just this morning. He was much too far away for Adrien to hear him or even see his face, but he could interpret his words just as well in the reserved, stoic motions he made as he spoke to a few funeral-goers. Adrien loved his fatherㅡand always wouldㅡbut eclipsing that love right now was a tidal wave of hatred. Not for his father, but for what his father had _done_.

Jacqueline Agreste always hated black. ' _The only color that's always in fashion,'_ she would say with a wink, and a roll of the eyes if Gabriel wasn't looking. Having to wear it so often to upscale events, she was always complaining about it, and much preferred to wear bright, vivacious colors whenever possible, pulling pieces of her wardrobe from every corner of the rainbow. Her flamboyant clothes always seemed like a reflection of her unquenchable spirit.

A tear stung at the corner of Adrien's eye as he surveyed the sea of black that had invaded his house, like carrion come to feed on the dead. The vast majority of them were here on what equated to business and they were wearing his mother's least favorite color. She would have hated this. The size of the crowd, the unfamiliar faces, the drab colors, the somber music, the open casket, she would have loathed it all, and he knew it with a damning certainty because he was given a copy of her will by the family lawyer. He read her wishes. These were not them.

Gabriel knew that.

And he did this anyway, because it was more savvy for business than what Jacqueline wanted.

"I brought you some food," Nathalie said quietly as she walked up to her employer's son. "You should really eat something, Adrien." She too was wearing black, and she was more than a little uncomfortable, having only worked under Gabriel for a few short weeks when the tragedy of Mme. Agreste's aneurysm struck, yet somehow tasked with the role of babysitter for the duration of the fallout. Despite her youth, children and Nathalie had never really clicked. She cleared her throat when Adrien didn't seem to hear her and held the small plate out to him. Having no clue what he liked to eat, she had taken a sample off every hors d'oeuvres tray in the hopes he would like at least one of them. She was fairly certain he'd eaten nothing at all since yesterday, and was bothered to pieces that her boss was taking such a hands-off approach with his son at a time like this.

Adrien looked down at the plate and then away again with no change of expression. "She wanted to be a tree," he said.

Nathalie lowered her offering, thrown by the statement. She followed his glazed-over eyes to the point across the room where he was staring: the open casket where Gabriel stood surrounded by a few of his contractors. "Is that so?" She really wasn't cut out for this. For the love of god, she was only a secretary.

"There's a company that cremates you and plants your ashes with a sapling after you die," Adrien went on quietly, eyes wet and shining. "That's what she wanted. I read it in her will."

There was something different about Adrien today, Nathalie realized. Sure he was wearing the standard black tuxedo along with everyone else, but she had never seen him behave this way in mixed company before. Leaning against the wall without a care in the world for appearances, hands in his pockets, hair all disheveled and circles deeper than the ocean bruising beneath his eyes. He wasn't just in grief, he was different. The death of Mme. Agreste had changed him.

"I'm sorry, I…" Nathalie pulled the plate back to her chest, eyebrows knitted together in confusion and sadness. "I don't know what to say, Adrien, I'm not very good with words."

For some unfathomable reason, this pulled the tiniest smile from himㅡa tired, sad thing, but a smile nonetheless. He finally met her eyes. "I like you," he said, and Nathalie was even more at a loss for words than before. "You never sugarcoat anything. You're not fake. Unlike all these other people," he added derisively, gesturing out at the mourning crowd. "Look at them. A woman is dead and they're _networking_. My mom, she would have… there should have been colors," he said, and his angry voice fractured into something infinitely more fragile. "She liked yellow, and pink, andㅡand she would have wanted jazz or pop, not this somberㅡthis, this funeral _bullshit_. She wanted to be a tree and heㅡ" His vision blurred and the whole hall swam before him as the tears he'd been holding at bay finally escaped. His hands shook. "He put her in a black dress."

"Adrien," Nathalie soothed, setting her free hand tentatively on his shoulder when his breath started to hitch. He was trying so hard not to cry and it hurt her heart more than she could say. The poor kid should be allowed to grieve, not dressed up like a mannequin and wielded as a tool to garner compassion for the benefit of his father's company. It was _wrong_. But she hardly knew the family or the child, so all she could do was awkwardly pat his arm as he cried, stepping between he and the rest of the room so as not to call the attention of anyone unwanted.

Nathalie's small act of kindness only opened the floodgates. Despite the fact that she barely knew him, he could sense her sincerity and it only made the falseness of everything else all the worse. Try as he might he couldn't dam the flood, and soon he was openly crying, lost to the world. Who knows, maybe he wouldn't have been so furious if he'd been given a single moment alone with his father to just talk about this. To grieve together like they were supposed to. Like a family. But since his mother's death two days ago he'd hardly even seen the man, and now he'd resorted to crying on his father's miserable secretary, who clearly wished she could be anywhere else right now. But at least she was here. That was more than his own father had done for him.

Although, he was about to have that wish granted in the most unpleasant of ways.

"Nathalie." The secretary about jumped out of her skin when her boss's smooth voice spoke just behind her. Adrien lifted his forehead off her shoulder, looking up in disbelief at his father where he had appeared at Nathalie's left arm. "Please excuse us," he said to her.

Adrien wouldn't meet Nathalie's eyes when she tried to gauge his reaction to this sudden turn of events. _The man is his father,_ she rationalized to herself. _I shouldn't feel this uncomfortable just walking away and leaving them alone together._ But she did, and so she hovered no more than ten feet away, waiting to resume her place consoling the poor kid once Gabriel had said whatever unintentionally callous thing he was bound to say. For all his genius when it came to what people _looked_ like, he was painfully stunted when it came time to actually interact with them.

"Adrien, look at me," Gabriel said softly, and despite Adrien's fury he felt just a little better at the sound of his father's gentle voice. He _needed_ that gentleness now more than ever, but was he here to comfort him or to shame him? Reluctantly he raised his eyes, resisting the urge to wipe his tear-stained face out of spite.

"Finally remembered me?" Adrien accused, his breath still coming in erratic bursts.

"You know I have many, many guests to attend to," Gabriel reminded him, hurt by the look in Adrien's eyes. He'd left the child in good, capable hands while he attended to all of this, and he was suffering too. Did Adrien forget that the wife was gone just as surely as the mother? "Guests that are watching," he pointed out.

"That's right, I forgot. Can't have anyone knowing we're human," Adrien spat back loudly enough for several nearby guests to overhear. If he wanted to cry he was going to fucking cry, spectators be damned. He _knew_ that's why his father had come over. How much would it have killed him to just, to just _hug him_ or something?

"Control yourself," Gabriel hissed, eyeing the guests, who were pretending not to have heard Adrien's outburst. "There is a time and a place for grievingㅡ"

"Oh, like at a funeral?" Adrien interrupted, and fire sparked in Gabriel's eyes.

"No," he barked quietly, speaking through clenched teeth. "We grieve on our own, at the end of the day when we have _privacy_."

"Maybe if you hadn't invited all these peopleㅡ"

"It is _not_ your place toㅡ"

"I don't care if it's my place!" People were definitely staring now, and Adrien took a vengeful sort of pleasure in that. "My mother is _dead_ and you filled our house with people who didn't even know her."

"That's enough."

"No it's _not_ ," he shouted, and it was so loud that his vocal chords turned to sandpaper. "You want me to stop crying in front of your coworkers? _Fuck you._ " Gasps rippled through the crowd, like he'd dropped a firecracker into a glassy pond. "You too," he rasped, reeling on the captivated crowd like a loosed tiger in a circus, and on cue they all shrank back, eyes wide. He'd never raised his voice at anyone in his life and it was so, _so_ liberating. "You're all as fake as he is and this funeral is a charade." With an unnecessary amount of force he shoved away his father, who had begun trying to steer him into the nearby corridor. "She hates black!" he sobbed. "Sh-she h- _hates black_."

"Nathalie," Gabriel implored, struggling to keep a grip on his son as he verbally assaulted the entire crowd.

"N-no, no need to p-pawn me off on your secretary again," Adrien seethed through his tears. "I'm le- _eaving_."

Gabriel's face was almost purple with concealed anger by this point, and Nathalie quailed under his iron-colored eyes, certain that she would somehow receive the blame for this. "Make sure he gets to his room."

Nathalie followed Adrien out of the hall at somewhat of a distance, still clinging onto that stupid plate of hors d'oeuvres, and feeling absurd for it.

 _All wrong,_ she heard him crying, and stepped over his suit jacket when he discarded it onto the marble floor, followed soon after by his tie. A flight of stairs later they arrived at the landing that led to his bedroom, and Nathalie paused by the bannister. Never once had he looked at her on their way up, and she was sure she wasn't welcome any farther. As she watched him wrench open his bedroom door and slam it behind him, a brief, icy breeze caught her from behind, rustling her curled hair. Startled, she wheeled around to look back at the spiral staircase whence they came.

There was nothing there. Goosebumps prickled along her arms and down her legs, but as a rational person she quickly dismissed her body's intuition. With a quick shake of the head she descended the stairs once more.

If only she had turned to looked at the hall one last time, she would have seen the inky black shadow making its way toward Adrien's door.

.

.

The bedroom he'd lived in since he was seven was enormous, but Adrien had never felt so claustrophobic or less at home than he did here now. Sent off to his fancy prison like he was no more than a child throwing a tantrum over spilt milkㅡhis father may as well have slapped him, and these familiar walls may as well have been an alien landscape. The signed artwork, the four-post bed, the stupid rock climbing wall that led to the second story bookshelves, it was all so empty and meaningless in the face of death. What good were possessions or money when the reaper came calling? He wasn't going to just play a game and calm down, like he always did. Not this time. He ripped his favorite console out of the TV at the mere thought of such an absurd thing, shattering it into splintered plastic pieces on the marble floor. Never again. He tore the TV off the wall too, which took a great deal more strength since it was mounted securely on a beam. It hurt and his muscles strained, but when it came away and the whole frame fractured on contact with the ground, it felt _good_.

No doubt his father would scorn the childish destruction, but for once in his life Adrien could not care less what his father thought of him. Because something had dawned on him today, for the first time in his life, and if his mother's death wasn't on its own quite enough to end his childhood, then today's realization was certainly the final nail in the coffin. His father was capable of being utterly and inexcusably wrong.

After this Adrien would never trust him fully again. He would never trust anyone again. And he wouldn't partake in this bullshit game that his father played, this _farce_. None of this mattered. None of it. Through his angry tears he stumbled over to his fencing sword and tore it off its holster on the wall, swiping his computer monitor off the desk in one swift motion because his father had bought it for him after a big argument last year instead of apologizing like a normal human being.

He hurled the computer chair across the room too for good measure before collapsing to his hands and knees.

The world around him went dark and watery and his head swam, his stomach plummeting. Was he passing out? His vision was going black. He just wanted to make his father pay. He wanted to bring the whole party down in flames, tear the somber music apart measure by measure, take his mother away from them and honor her fucking wishes. He wanted this whole house destroyed and everything it it too. Hell, he wanted his father's entire worldwide brand to crumble into ashes, just so his father would know, would finally _see and feel_ just how little any of it meant in the face of death.

Nothing meant anything and in that moment Adrien wanted there to _be_ nothing. He wanted to be nothing. He desperately craved this darkness that was swallowing him, starting at his wrists on the ground and licking its way up like flames, wanted the void that pushed gently at the back of his head like a pillow, offering relief from this unending nightmare. When the void spoke he was already almost gone.

 _I can help with that,_ said the void.

Adrien's eyes snapped open.

He gasped, falling over backwards as he saw a swirling black maelstrom rising up from the marble, dragging him down into some unknowable fate. _A spirit?_ "N-no," he sputtered, "stopㅡ" but his tongue was like lead and the spirit had already taken root in his mind. It was too late. The bedroom warped around him, twisting as he fell into his own head, watching the room as if from a great distance as he hit the bottom of a chasm.

So when he rose again it was almost on puppet strings.

Adrien looked at his hands, dripping with darkness that faded like rain, and trailed like mist as he moved. "I don't understand." He was so far away, and receding still, clinging to the cliff that was consciousness with the barest of fingertips.

The spirit was silent, save for a burning flash of white hot desire that seared Adrien from the inside out, and when his vision cleared again the bedroom was up in flames, floor to ceiling.

The spirit went still again, as if to say...

 _Do you understand now?_

.

.

In the vaulted hall of the Agreste Mansion, somebody screamed.

The musicians stopped playing at once, and all three hundred and seventy-nine guests turned to look toward the south corridor, where the scream had originated. There emerging from the hall was a figure of indomitable darkness, a wild predator stumbling into the room, and behind him a wall of uninterrupted flame. The chaos that ensued was immediate and uncontrollable as a sudden mass exodus exploded in the path of the most feared spirit on Earth, unmistakable despite his four year absence.

People shoved each other out of the way, screaming and panicking, yet the spirit and its new conduit made their way slowly across the room with all the purpose of a stalking cat, giving no guest the time of day or any elsewise threat. Despite the lack of focus on the people, deadly fire bloomed with each footstep, catching impossibly on the marble floor, cracking and fracturing the room in his wake in a slow-moving earthquake that crossed slowly but surely toward the coffin on the other side of the room. Toward Gabriel Agreste, who stood frozen solid, heart in his throat.

A woman streamed past him, dress hiked to her knees as she ran. " _Le Moissonneur_ ," she sobbed, " _le Moissonneur_."

But everyone knew the Reaper was dead. Lucas Guilherme (or the Angel as many had taken to calling him after his tragic death) had taken him down as he fell from a skyscraper, four years ago when the Reaper travelled all the way to Lima to try and kill him; just another chapter in the long bloody history that was the war between Tikki and Plagg. Between life and death. No, the Reaper was long dead. But it seemed the demon Plagg had at last found a new human to bend to his will. And he was almost to Gabriel. No eyes, no face, nothing but a deep blackness that Gabriel felt he might fall into headfirst if he let him get too close.

He should run, he knew. These were the jaws of death he was staring into, and he would not leave his son alone to face this cruel world so soon after losing his mother. He needed to run. He needed to find Adrien.

 _Adrien._ Was he alright?

But behind him, Jacqueline's body lay serene in her coffin. It was enough to give him pause.

Then the shadow was upon him, and despite the person's face being completely obscured by shadow, he knew he was being stared in the eye. "Move," he said, and Gabriel realized it was a child. Plagg had chosen a _child_.

When Gabriel didn't move, the child stepped up onto the platform, shoulders squaring. "MOVE!"

Gabriel dove aside and hit the ground running. Only at the door, jostled side to side by the still-escaping associates, did he look back to see what had become of his dear wife's remains. What he saw was enough to send a chill down his spine that would never quite recede, no matter the years that came after this moment.

The boy lifted the body from the coffin, his black movements stark and precise against the roaring yellow-white flames that devoured the hall behind him, like an eclipse of the sun, and despite the urge to shield his eyes he watched, unable to look away. Pulling the body close to his chest, the silhouette stood there for just a moment, strangely serene set against all that violence and destruction, stirring Gabriel's memory of the statue _La Pieta._

Then the body was dust, disintegrated to ash that spiralled up, up, and upㅡ

ㅡand Jacqueline was gone.

And Gabriel knew then that his son was gone too.

* * *

.

.

People behave in unfortunate ways when they are in the midst of fresh grief, and sometimes we do things that reflect the worst we have to offer. Hopefully no one hates Gabriel too much for this chapter, or thinks Adrien's gone off the deep end. Don't worry, my darlings, they'll both get their redemption. It's important to remember that this happened ten years prior to the present-day plot. There'll be a lot of flashbacks so I'll always preface them with a note on how long ago the events happened. Hope this didn't hurt you guys too much. This story might give you a little whiplash. Next chapter is gonna be more like the last one if you catch my drift. ;) ;) ;)


	4. Schrodinger's Cat

So, I got a really angry anonymous review on the last chapter on FFnet, and while I got the impression the anon was more angry at Gabriel than at me as the author, I still feel the need to respond. So, this is in response to the anon 'Hiding this time' (sorry for the incoming novel).

Hey, you don't have to hide my friend. I'm not offended that the last chapter pissed you off so much. It was supposed to. I just wish I could have replied to your comment because you brought up some good points and I want to address them. Gabriel's actions were inexcusable, and I really could have phrased my endnote on the last chapter better. I definitely wasn't trying to excuse what he did, because what he did was terrible. I'm not even sure canon-Gabriel would do such a thing. BUT, I had to make it heinous enough to warrant kind, sweet, innocent Adrien Agreste getting chosen by Plagg, the most destructive spirit on the planet. It had to be pretty damn bad to get Adrien that angry. (Judging by the reactions, I _think_ I made it bad enough.)

I don't wanna give any spoilers but I will say there was a reason behind what Gabriel did. That's what I was hinting at when I mentioned 'redemption.' Reasons are not excuses, but sometimes-and perhaps in Adrien's case here-it becomes more possible to forgive a terrible deed when we understand _why_ it happened. Time and understanding are large factors in forgiveness.

This next part is a little personal and I wasn't planning on saying this, but after that review I feel like I need to. Sometimes, we as humans have family that we know are bad people. And yet, we are helpless to do anything except continue love them anyway. My own dad is a bad father and a terrible man who has hurt my family time and again, yet no matter how many times I cut ties with him I find myself sucked back into his world. So I say this from experience: just because someone does awful things (that we _know_ _objectively_ are wrong) doesn't mean you can just turn off your love for them. Humans are complicated. Try to keep this in mind-that I'm writing from a position of extreme empathy when it comes to the chains that bind Adrien to his father.

(P.S. - Yes, the therapist was supposed to come off as bad and poorly timed. The day after a death is pretty soon to suddenly be immersed in therapy for it, no? Especially when a conversation with Gabriel would have sufficed in its place. Adrien hit a series of Serious Bad Luck incidents-the death, the subsequent sleep deprivation, the inadequate therapy, the betrayal of Gabriel, the absence of Chloe at the wake. If any one of those things had been different he might not have gotten possessed. He drew the ultimate short straw.)

Okay, rant over.

 **About this chapter:** If you are unfamiliar with Schrodinger's Cat, it might be to your benefit to look up the wikipedia article and give it a quick skim. You'll get way more out of this chapter, and it's really fascinating anyway.

* * *

 **[Schrodinger's Cat]**

* * *

A flurry of shimmering bubbles popped in Marinette's face.

Startled, Marinette looked up from the page she'd been falling into. Tikki hovered above her, preparing another flurry of bubbles that vanished again when she saw she'd gotten her chosen's attention. "Are you listening?" Tikki giggled, and sent one last bubble at Marinette's face for good measure. It popped, and even though Marinette knew she wouldn't feel the spray she blinked on instinct anyway. "Alya's trying to tell you a story, Marinette."

 _Oh. Right._

Marinette looked across the living room and saw that Alya had both hands on her hips. She and Tikki shared an exasperated look. "Thank you, glitterbug," Alya said. Nino served as the bemused background at the other end of the couch, pretending not to notice any of them as he slouched down with the game controller resting on his stomach. Sword slashes and zombie gurgles assaulted Marinette's ears from the TV speakers. Chastised, she tucked the bookmark back into it's place.

"Sorry," Marinette murmured. "What were you saying?"

Groaning good-naturedly at her best friend's spaciness, Alya resettled into her spot by Nino, glaring at Marinette where she sat curled up in the armchair. "Girl, you are seriously out of it today. Are you sure your shoot went alright yesterday? You've just been… weird, since then. I feel like something happened that you're not telling us."

Adrien's face flashed in Marinette's mind.

 _Chat's_ face.

Marinette sighed, eyes flitting back down to the book she was holding. It was Tales from the White Hart by Arthur C. Clarke, who had been Chat's favorite author for as long as she could remember. So any lingering hope she'd had for convincing herself she was insane and that the man she'd met yesterday wasn't really Chat Noir had been dashed, not five minutes after Adrien departed the photographer's flat, the instant she found his forgotten book on the rooftop worktable. She'd tucked it into her bag before leaving, thinking that Fate was just giving her the middle finger at this point.

As if that wasn't enough (it was; it was seriously enough) then the bookmark he'd left inside the book was truly the red nail polish on Fate's middle finger. The Ladybug bookmark. She wanted to die just looking at it.

"Sorry, Al." Marinette tried arrange her facial muscles into something contrite, but it felt like she was trying to control a marionette doll with half its strings snipped. "Continue your story. I'm listening, I promise."

Shaking her head with amusement, Alya launched back into her tale of journalistic adventure. Tikki followed along with the story raptly, humming at every turn, and eventually drifted away from Marinette toward the ceiling, where she pulled a swatch of light from her dress and idly morphed it into a shining deer. The deer pranced around her on the ceiling as Tikki settled there upside-down, her legs criss-crossed and her hair fanning out below her as if she were underwater. When Tikki gasped in surprise at a twist in Alya's story the deer broke free of its creator to prance about the room, and circled around Marinette once before shattering in a splash of glitter.

Marinette sighed as the glitter faded. A white hart.

If only Tikki knew how important Tales from the White Hart really was. Her mind wandered away from the living room again, and she found herself on her phone behind the cover of the book, doing precisely what she'd been trying to distract herself from doing by reading Chat's book in the first place.

Researching him.

Adrien Agreste was the son of Marinette's lifelong personal hero, and it was honestly a miracle that she'd never looked at any picture of him with any degree of scrutiny or interest before now, or she'd have known right away who he was. The only child of the Agrestes was born in Paris, France in February of 1993ㅡaccording to the lengthy Wikipedia page she had read the minute she got home from the photoshoot yesterday, which also detailed his modeling career in sterile bullet points, right up to his final gig five years ago. That final modeling date had instantly stirred a fond memory of her shadowed partner.

Chat had brought a thousand dollar bottle (she knew because it had tasted so delicious that she'd looked it up later out of curiosity, and her jaw had hit the floor) of Chateau Lafite to their meetup on the night he quit the mysterious job he had always loathed. Together they'd drunk to his newly brightened future. She'd been so happy for him that night, that he'd finally gathered the strength to stand up to that grim father figure of his. And yet… the father her best friend struggled so much with, to love and forgive and please and make peace with, was suddenly Gabriel Agreste, the man she'd always dreamt to someday work with. What was she supposed to make of that? Chat had never gone into much detail regarding the fateful day when Plagg chose him, save for 'my father did something unforgivable.' She had always hated Chat's unnamed father for whatever he'd done that had triggered a life sentence with Plagg for his son.

It was jarring to realize the man she'd hated for almost ten years was the same man she had idolized for even longer.

Initially, she'd only intended to briefly look Chat Noir up, just to get it out of her system. But of course she hadn't been able to stop at his Wikipedia page. Following an internal link to another website, she'd found herself sifting through hundreds of photographsㅡadverts and editorials and the likeㅡdating all the way back to his early childhood. It was surreal. She knew those eyes; in every photograph they seared her, reminding her again just who she was looking at.

There was a veil of darkness that clung to Chat Noir like a cloak of lively octopus ink when he was transformed, shrouding him from the world. But he'd always liked Ladybug to see him. So for her sake he would push the darkness away from his face until it covered just the space around his eyes, like a mask. Back when they were intimate he would concentrate harder and reveal a bit more. (Okay… a lot more. Thinking about it now while looking at his true identity was enough to make her lightheaded.) Consequently, she'd seen almost all of him that there was to see besides his identity. Even still, she never could have been prepared for how jaw-droppingly handsome he was outside his spirit transformation. He'd always been a bit cocky about his looks, but she'd chalked it up to his crass sense of humor and an understandable need to compensate for his other insecurities.

Now, instead of listening to Alya's story, she found herself scrolling through the recentmost posts in his Instagram feed. (His smiles were a bit realer in these than in the adverts and editorials and it made her heart swell dangerously). And there was one thing for sure: it was clear he was simply being honest with that suave overconfidence of his. Because god damn it, he was beautiful.

God damn it.

Oh no.

Ohhh no.

Every biography of Gabriel Agreste she'd ever read caught up with her all at once, out of nowhere. It was with a darkening heart that Marinette navigated back to Adrien's wikipedia page and scrolled to look at his parents. Her eyes flitted straight past Gabriel and lingered on Jacquelineㅡspecifically, on the date of her death. A mere two days before the appearance of Chat Noir. Oh, Chat, she thought despairingly. He'd never told her… never given her an inkling of what had happened to him. The accounts of that day were so scattered and erratic that no one had ever been able to decide for certain where Chat Noir had first appeared and at what time. But one thing Marinette remembered with total clarity, because Gabriel was her lifelong hero, and because she had gone to him personally later that week (as Ladybug) and offered to help him rebuild the house with her powers. (He had respectfully declined). Chat Noir had burned the Agreste mansion to the ground on the day of Jacqueline Agreste's funeral.

The memory of Chat on that first day flashed in Marinette's mind, when she'd first seen past the terrible darkness into his startlingly human eyes. The haunted look in them when he took control of his body back from the spirit that had taken him over. The agony. Do it, he'd said, and made no move to stop her slitting his throat. Just do it.

Oh my god.

"Marinette," Alya whined, snapping Mari's attention away from her phone so hard she experienced mild whiplash. "That. Is. It. Out with it! What happened at the photoshoot?"

"O-out with what? The shoot went fine," Marinette reiterated, the words so well-rehearsed by this point that they slipped out easily, despite the gravity of her recentmost revelation. She almost believed them herself. "Really, it went marvelously." But she wilted at Alya's disapproving posture; the lie clearly wasn't enough anymore. "Honestly, Alya, the photoshoot is not what's bothering me."

"Aha!" Alya crowed, wheeling toward Nino and causing him to drop his controller and die a horrible onscreen death-by-zombie. "I told you there was something bothering her. Didn't I tell you?"

Grumbling his way toward the start button to pause, Nino readjusted his skewed glasses. "And I told you to let her tell you in her own time."

"Mari's Time runs ten times too slow for me. Come on, Marinette, just spill the beans already. I can tell when something is eating at you."

Nino scratched at the bristles on his chin, trying to make heads or tails of Marinette's guarded expression, and decided to turn off the console altogether when she brought her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. "Dang, it's something big, isn't it? Oh no. It's not…?" He faltered, unwilling to be the one to bring up the touchiest subject of the Marinette household.

Alya had no such reservations. "It's Chat," she said bluntly. "It's Chat, isn't it?"

"Alya," Nino growled.

She chose not to hear Nino, taking Marinette's silence as confirmation. Leaning forward with her hands on her knees, she lowered her voice, even though she knew Tikki would hear anyway. The spirit was right there on the ceiling, and was now looking between the three of them with ever-increasing interest. "What happened? Oh, honey, I thought we were past this."

"Alya!"

"I just don't want to see you hurt again, Mar. Don't you remember how hard it was when you guys finallyㅡ"

"Alya!" Nino tossed one of the throw pillows at his wife in order to shut her up; when she got going on something she was passionate about there was almost no stopping her. When Alya deflected the pillow and turned two murderous eyes on him, he just pointed at Mari. For a moment it looked like their friend was about to admit something profound. She opened her mouth and cocked her head to the side.

But then Marinette looked to the ceiling, where Tikki was now standing, intent with curiosity over her chosen's response. The yellow sunrays that filled the apartment passed right through her from the window behind Marinette's armchair. She cast no shadow on the wall.

"It's nothing," Marinette murmured, and lowered her gaze. "Just forget about it."

And in the end they let it go, but they didn't forget.

.

.

Adrien was browsing Creativentures again.

It hadn't been hard to find Ladybug's online shopㅡthe one Dennis had mentioned with flattery. All it took was a simple google search for Marinette Dupain-Cheng, and five seconds later he was scrolling through her online catalogue, stopping every fifth picture as he stumbled across a photo where she was modeling a garment herself. God, she was so talented. And stunning. And radiant. And so _tantalizingly close._ And…

...and this was not helping. This was seriously not helping.

He clicked away from her website, but... he just ended back up on Facebook again.

Living in the Information Age was both a blessing and a curse, and knowing every award and every accomplishment that Ladybug had ever made outside the sphere they inhabited together was both thrilling and crushing. Thrilling because he'd always dreamt of knowing her like this. Crushing because she was closer than ever before, and still he was banned from her life. Scrolling through her tagged pictures on Facebook was probably the worst thing he could do for himself now, and honestly, wouldn't she think it was creepy of him? Yet despite all his misgivings he kept at it anyway, whenever Plagg's attention was otherwise diverted, doing almost nothing else for two straight days except researching Ladybug's civilian life through the various social platforms she was involved in. Mainly via Facebook photo albums. Clicking through them was enough to make his wistful heart weep. These were the university friends she was always telling stories about, and these ones were the best friends that were married to each other. Those ones were her loving parents. This was the little girl she used to babysit, all grown up now. Here was the school she'd attended when they first met, and those were her classmates back then. This was the haircut she had the year they first kissed.

For two straight days he had obsessed over her. So maybe when he accidentally clicked the 'friend request' button, it was less a freak accident than an inevitable one.

"No no no, shit, no!" His hands flew to his head, fisting in his hair in outright panic. He didn't know what he was supposed to do in this messed up situation they were in, but he was pretty sure that friending her on Facebook would have been at the very bottom of the idea-shitpile.

Behind him, Plagg gave off the tiniest _mrow_ in his sleep. Checking that the black cat was still safely sleeping in the wedge of sunlight on the hardwood floor of his bedroom, he silenced himself before turning back to the computer screen. The worst thing he could possibly do right now would be to alert Plagg to the existence and importance of Marinette Dupain-Cheng, so he needed to get ahold of himself before he accidentally woke the spirit. Now, what to do? Should he just unfriend her? Would she still see a notification?

Before he had time to decide, a notification popped up on his own screen. He stared at it, gobsmacked.

(+Marinette Dupain-Cheng has accepted your friend request.)

Numbly he clicked on the notification, and the usual little message box appeared, prompting him to start a conversation with her. A glance over his shoulder at Plagg told him the cat had rolled over again, but was still sleeping. The empty message box was burning a white hot hole in his monitor, and next to Marinette's name was a little green dot, a tantalizing reminder that on the other side of this computer program was a real person and it was Ladybug and despite the overwhelming danger she'd face if Plagg ever found out who she was, she had accepted the request almost instantly.

What was he supposed to make of that?

Should he say something?

They were still treading water before a waterfall. Neither of them had voiced the truth yet, and if he was being honest with himself, the safest thing for them both would be to go back upstream. To pretend this never happened and never speak of it again. To let it go; back into the ether where it belonged. If they never spoke of it, then it would never be real.

 _Kind of like Schrodinger's Cat,_ he thought to himself ruefully. Should they open the box and weather its contents together, or let the cat lie undisturbed in its quantum grave?

(Marinette is typing something . . .)

"Oh shit!"

The alert cause his heart to leap up into his throat so hard that he almost didn't notice that his extremely verbal exclamation had wakened Plagg. Luckily for him, the cat gave off a loud, unattractive yawn before switching to his human form with a smoky flourish. It was with trembling stupid-fingers that Adrien exited Facebook. The page closed out before Marinette had finished typing, making room for the tab behind it (an innocent news article) before Plagg had made his lazy way over to see what Adrien had gotten up to during his catnap.

"What are you doing?" Plagg droned.

"Oh, go chase a bird or something." In the world of Adrien vs. Plagg, this was code for 'fuck off.'

But Plagg was well-rested now and did not really feel like fucking off. "You look… weasely," he countered, peering at the web browser suspiciously. "Let me guess: pornography."

Pissed off at being forced to abandon whatever magical thing had been about to happen with Marinette, Adrien scowled and shoved his chair away from the desk. Sarcasm dripped from each consonant as he gave the most annoying answer he could think of. "Yep."

Pretending to retch, Plagg backed off back toward the chaise beneath the window. " _Yeghck_. I always get the gross ones."

.

.

Marinette watched the little green 'online' dot disappear from beside Adrien's name before she'd even decided what to say, and even though it hurt, she knew it was for the best.

.

.

It wasn't until Thursday afternoon that Ladybug and Chat Noir were to see each other again. The news put out a yellow alert for a potentially violent possession, and with a pounding heart that had nothing at all to do with the new spirit, Adrien slipped away from the Gabriel brand shareholders' meeting in order to pull the small burner phone out of his back pocket. Only one contact in here. He texted her as he walked, opting for the old 'pretend there's nothing crazy happening between us right now' approach. _(See the news? I can be there in ten minutes.)_ Whatever was happening with them, now was not the time to figure it out. They had a job to do.

Her reply came immediately. _(En route.)_

Despite its volatile nature, the spirit went down easier than most. It was one of the spirits derived from human emotionㅡanger, most likelyㅡand though it was violent, it had chosen an uncoordinated and perhaps _too_ angry host to wield its power. After a harrowing but brief chase through an evacuated farmer's market, a dozen or so organic food stands were destroyed, but Adrien had at last managed to get the broad-shouldered man into a headlock, arms twisted into the air so that he couldn't lash out or break anything else.

"Quick, do it," Adrien urged as Ladybug caught up to them again, still shaking dried pasta from her loose curls from when the man had thrown her into one of the stands. The spirit-endowed man struggled hard, and Adrien's own spirit provided no physical assistance beyond the power to destroy. So in situations like this Adrien was completely on his own, relying on his own human strength to grapple with superhuman demons. He'd never harmed anyone beyond the point of repair and, as long as he had even the thinnest scrap of humanity left inside his heart, he never would. That was where Ladybug stepped in.

"Try to hold him still," Marinette directed, then without any preamble put her hand on the stranger's heart.

Adrien watched her work with the same magnitude of awe he had when they were fourteen. Even though she had the power to create almost anything she set her mind to, _this_ was the power that fascinated Adrien the most.

It took effect almost immediately. The man screamed, then gagged, then writhed in Chat Noir's arms. He stumbled backward but kept his iron grip locked, veins bulging on his arms and necks from the strain. Tikki could not touch anything on the physical plane. Nor could any other spirit, for that matter, and this was why they went after humans in the first place; they were desperate for eyes to see the world and for feet to touch the ground. The only thing a spirit could touch was another spirit. So when Marinette touched the stranger's chest and fisted her hand and yanked backward again, it was not really her touching him. It was Tikki, taking a firm hold of the spirit of anger and ripping him out.

As soon as it was out the stranger went limp in Adrien's arms. Together Chat Noir and Ladybug watched the spirit swirl about them with fury, a smattering of paint and smoke and lights that could hurt them no more than the easterly wind. Then it was gone.

"I don't feel like giving a statement today," Marinette said as the stranger came to himself with painstakingly slow progress.

Adrien, who'd been trying to keep the stranger on his feet, finally just let him slide down into a sitting position so he wouldn't fall. That was probably safer. "Me neither," he agreed. There had been no time to talk or think when they arrived on the scene. It was just go, go, go. It'd been all too easy to slip back into their dynamic routine. But now…

He took a moment to look at her. To really look at her.

She was tired, he realized, even though her face was half obscured by a satin mask, which was acid green in color today. It was always some new shade of the rainbow he'd never seen on her before. Yes, there were distinct circles under her eyes, not quite hidden under that mask, and she was normally faster than she'd been here today. Was she losing as much sleep over this mess as he was? Whenever they were out in public she always let the transformation have its full effect over her, casting her in a frighteningly beautiful light, a forever shifting film of glittery sunshine that obscured her from view. It covered her hair and clothes like a dream, ensuring no one would ever recognize her, much the way that darkness covered his. It was only when they became partners that she had first began to drop these lovely layers, one by one, when they were alone together. He remembered when he first learned her hair was black. When he first saw what dress she was wearing under all that light.

He wondered what dress she was wearing today. (It was clear it was a dress from the way the light shifted in folds around her legs while she walked.) He wondered if she'd made it herself.

Sighing loudly, he rubbed his hand on the back of his neck. This was all so messy.

"Let's get out of here before the press arrives. They're already coming up the road," she pointed out, eyeing the nearby throng of reporters.

"Rooftop stroll?" he suggested. There was no way in hell they could ever speak of Monday, because Plagg and Tikki could hear everything they said and see everything they did when they were in spirit form. But he didn't think he could stand it if they parted ways just yet.

In lieu of answering, she procured a grappling hook from the space between atoms and offered it to him. Then she hung onto his neck as he scaled the side of the nearest building, both of them ignoring the shouts of reporters below. In tense but amiable silence they meandered away from the scene of the possession in no particular direction, sometimes conjuring a plank of wood to cross the gap between rooftops. Many times they opened their mouths to speak, only to close them again, at a loss for what to say. There was nothing that could be said about the situation without alerting Plagg or Tikki. They were stuck and they knew it. It was agonizing.

It wasn't until they'd been walking along the rooftops for almost forty-five minutes when Adrien got the courage to speak. They'd arrived at some sort of tall municipal building, and scaled a twenty meter ladder-esque bridge to get up there from the rooftop below it. As they finished crossing Marinette's impromptu ladder contraption, Adrien disintegrated it behind them as he always did.

"Are you familiar with the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment?" he asked.

Marinette paused, which allowed him to get a few steps ahead of her before he turned back to gauge her reaction. "Yes," she said slowly. Was this going somewhere safe, or toward the deadly cliff they'd both been toeing? "This better not be leading up to a pun of some kind."

A bark of laughter escaped Adrien then, and for a second it was like nothing at all had changed between them since Monday. Banter was safe. Banter was familiar. "Princess," he purred, "you should know by now that all my decisions are made in the direction of a pun of some kind."

Rolling her eyes, Marinette resumed walking without him, jumping deftly up onto the ledge that separated the rooftop safehaven from the sheer drop to the right, where the rush hour traffic mosied along far below. At least the ice was broken, now. "Moving on," she prompted. "Why do you mention it?"

"Oh, no reason, I guess. It's just been… on my mind." His voice turned wistful and strange as he watched her nimble progress along the ledge as if it were nothing loftier than a garden wall in a park, putting one fearless foot in front of the other. In a way, despite their close proximity, she was still just that little green dot on his computer screen. Present. Immediate. Distant. Untouchable. With great effort he shook off the reverie and sat down on the ledge directly in front of her, obstructing her path. With a deep, pointed expression, he effectively put a halt to any quip she might have been brewing up in response. "I've been thinking," he said, and had to hope against hope that she would pick up on the cue while Plagg and Tikki remained oblivious. "I'm not sure I'm on board with Schrodinger's conclusion."

The intense look on his face was totally at odds with the casual anecdoteㅡso much so that Marinette was forced to assume that his meaning was elsewhere entirely. It gave her pause. Was he speaking in code? Brimming with intensity, Chat's face was nigh unreadable.

So she answered slowly and carefully. "You mean the idea that until the box is opened and the contents observed, the cat exists in a state of both life and death?"

"Yes. Exactly. That's exactly what I'm not on board with."

Far below them a car horn blared, and a random civilian leaned out of the driver's seat window to wave up at the two of them hysterically. Adrien waved back, smiling despite the heavy atmosphere between he and Marinette. The fans of Chat Noir were few and far between, so he never took them for granted, always stopping to wave or sign an autograph or take a photo when the occasion arose. He'd earned those fans with sweat and blood. Marinette watched this warm interaction between Adrien and the faraway driver silently, too caught up in the emotional undertow of the conversation to acknowledge the fan herself. With a forlorn sigh, she dropped down to sit beside her partner, her feet coming to rest on an outcropped flagpole.

"Just because no one's opened the box yet, does it really mean a dead cat isn't dead?" Adrien wondered as the car drove away.

Understanding dawned on her as she examined the parts of Adrien's face that weren't cover by his black smoky mask. The agony thereㅡagony she'd become intimately familiar with in these last three days since the shoot. His shoulders were tense and his hands gripped the ledge tightly. She imagine if she could see past the darkness to the bare skin of his hands, the knuckles would be turning white with pent-up tension. It was obvious he wasn't talking about quantum physics at all.

"Ah, okay. I see what you're getting at. If a tree falls in the forest and no one's around to hear it," Marinette recited, "does it make a sound?"

"What do you think, my lady?"

Even without looking back at him she could feel the weight of his eyes weighing on her now, and knew by the gravity of his tone what he was really asking.

"I think…"

She could only meet those painfully familiar eyes for a second, coming to rest instead on the waxing crescent moon in the east. The French flag fluttered in the wind below her feet.

"I think that when a tree falls," she decided, "it technically always makes a sound. But, a sound wave is just vibration of matter. It doesn't mean anything until someone observes itㅡuntil someone hears the crash in the woods and understands that a tree has just fallen. In that sense, I suppose I would say: no. If no one hears it then doesn't make a sound."

"Hmm. Then… what if someone hears it and pretends not to?"

Marinette countered that loaded question with one of her own, albeit a little more prickly than his. "What if Schrodinger knew the cat was dead, and he left the box closed so he wouldn't have to bury it?"

Cynical laughter bubbled out of Adrien's chest. "In that case, all I can say is that it sure would suck to be Schrodinger's cat."

"Yeah," Marinette sighed, "it suppose it would." And to her dismay her lip trembled.

Adrien noticed.

But, for her sake, he pretended not to.

.

.

"Hey kid, you got a thing on your thing."

"What?" Adrien leaned out of the bathroom, where he was currently toweling his hair dry after a long, hot shower.

"Your thing is lighting up with a thing on that thing. You know. The friend thing."

"For heaven's sake, speak French, Plagg. What are you on about?" Adrien knew that Plagg knew the words to describe modern electronics, and it tickled him to force the ancient spirit to say them out loud. Anything to annoy Plagg.

The spirit rolled his eyes and pointed to Adrien's phone, irritated more than ever that he couldn't touch or affect any objects on the physical plane without Adrien's help. With every generation the world of humans grew louder. This stupid electronic device of Adrien's never shut up. "Your phone!" he complained. "It'sㅡugh," he shuddered, "it's dinging again." Leaning over the bed to scowl at the words on the screen, he read aloud, "Facebook message from some girl named Marinette. You know, after all I've done for you, the least you could do would be to put this cursed thing on silent once in awhile."

Fuck. _Fuck_.

Adrien almost tripped back into the bathroom, hanging up his towel in the least suspicious way he could possibly manage. The bathroom had gone sideways between one moment and the next. He checked his face in the mirror. Did he look casual? Did he look as terrified as he felt? What did she send him? More importantly, had Plagg seen the message's contents?

It was a week ago now that Adrien had given up on ever seeing Marinette again outside their spiritual trysts as Ladybug and Chat Noir: self-appointed protectors of Paris. The veiled conversation on the roof where they'd spoken in riddles about cats in boxes and trees falling in the woods had been just enough for him to gauge her thoughts on the matter without outright broaching the subject and giving the situation away to both Tikki and Plagg. It was clear she wanted to let it lie. Brush it under the rug. As much as it killed him to do so, he knew that was the right thing to do. He'd just needed to hear her say so. After that conversation with Ladybug, he'd been prepared to go his separate ways with the civilian Marinette forever.

 _So why was she messaging him?_

"Who's Marinette?"

Strolling out of the bathroom with a criminal amount of nonchalance, Adrien fought against his instincts, which wanted him to sprint at his phone full speed to pick it up and answer her. "Just some girl I met earlier this week." Angling his phone away from Plagg (at that point whether it was suspicious or not was irrelevant, he couldn't have Plagg looking too closely at Marinette's face or seeing a potentially giveaway message), he clicked on the notification.

 _(Hi,)_ it read. _(I don't know if you remember me but we met at Dennis McCorkle's flat last week. You left your book on the worktable, so I took it home with me. I'm sure you've been missing it. I'd like to get it back to you. Do you have an address where I could send it?)_

"Wait, you did a photoshoot on Monday?" Adrien jumped out of his skin when he realized that Plagg had mosied around him to read over his shoulder. "I thought you quit that garbage."

"It was spur of the moment," Adrien explained numbly. So this was how it was going to be, then. He could play pretend if that was truly what she wanted. He typed out a neutral response, something he would say if they really were mere strangers to each other, just as she had done.

 _(I remember you,)_ he replied. This would be the perfect moment to ask her on a date, if they were strangers that had only just met, instead of two lifelong friends gasping for breath in a web of ever-increasing lies. _(I appreciate it, but there's no sense in shipping it to me when we live in the same city. I'll meet you instead. Would that be okay?)_

Just the once, he reasoned to himself.

"Damn," Plagg laughed. "Cutting right to the chase."

"Oh, shut up," Adrien grumbled. It only took a second for Marinette to respond, and the response made the blood rush to his head, harkening both fear and excitement as they bloomed in his stomach.

.

.

 _(Okay,)_ Marinette replied.

For better or worse, she was going to try and leave this pandora's box closed. But oh how hard it would be.

* * *

.

.

Few things.

I have an enduring headcanon that Adrien and Marinette use burner phones to contact each other as Lady and Chat before they know each other's identities. It just makes sense to me. (I have a whole story about this, which was insanely fun to write. Double Entendre, if you're interested.) You get a little more explanation about how spirits/possession works in this universe. All this stuff is important setup for later plot developments.

Next chapter's gonna be pretty intense again, though not nearly as heart-wrenching as the last one. Get ready to find out how Marinette got her powers. And to see the 'first meeting' scene I've been hinting at since the prologue. Yea boyeee this train is not slowing down anytime soon TOOT TOOT MOTHERFUCKER or yknow whatever sound trains make.


	5. The Angel

THIS WAS SO HARD TO WRITE AGHH. This chapter was seriously the second hardest chapter of anything I've EVER written, I honestly don't know why, but that's why this took a whole month to come out. Here you go, cuties~

Also, I have a miraculous tumblr now. hmu speakswords

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* * *

 **[The Angel]**

* * *

 _(Ten years ago…)_

* * *

When the worst happened, Marinette was alone.

Newly departed from a late matinee in the heart of Paris, where she'd met up with a few friends from lycée, Marinette was now on her own. Skipping along down the golden sidewalk, she entertained herself by stepping in time with the upbeat funk song drifting through her earbuds. This was definitely the wrong way if she wanted to get home before dark finished falling (" _If enjoying the city I live in is wrong, then I don't want to be right!"_ she had huffed goodnaturedly when her friends poked fun at her insistence upon this route), which was why she was now alone instead of walking back home with them. But the theater was so close to the Eiffel Tower. It felt silly not to go. So that was why she went ahead and crossed the Seine to spend a little while in its lengthening shadow before calling it a night.

Living here for all fourteen of her years had done little to dim her wonder at the beauty of this city or its architecture. Far above her the tower reached toward the darkening sky, that rich unbroken blue giving way to a softer periwinkle. All along the sides yellow lights blinked awake for their first five-minute-vigil of the early evening.

Near a low concrete wall lined with blooming late-autumn flora, Marinette picked a pink-petaled one and gave it a happy sniff before tucking it behind her ear. Then she flopped onto the grass, humming to herself, and closed her eyes.

And that was how disaster found her.

If she hadn't had her eyes closed and her ears full of sound, she would have noticed before it was too late. Would have run far, far away from this place. But as it were, she was jolted out of her peaceful reverie by a sudden hand on her arm. From her comfortable prone position in the grass she was dragged off without warning, legs dancing helplessly behind her as she struggled to stand up in the whirlwind of motion. That's when she saw it. Smoke billowing into the sky behind her. Fire, crackling starward. _The Seine was on fire._

When she ripped her headphones out and let them fall to the ground, she heard the screams.

"Hey, let me go!" Marinette demanded, at last finding her footing and voice. But the stranger just dragged her along in the opposite direction of the flaming river with no explanation, no word or glance. He was just one of hundredsㅡthousandsㅡall fleeing, all in different directions. The lovely plaza beneath the Eiffel Tower had become a frenzied swarm of fear while she just _sat there_ listening to music. She looked around wildly for help, pleading, but no one spared her a glance. "Let go!" she cried again, "you're hurting me!" ㅡand then resorted to biting him. The man dropped her arm to look back at her like she had lost her mind, and Marinette recoiled from the orange flames reflected deep in his eyes.

" _Le Moissonneur,"_ he shouted at her, then pointed behind her in such abject terror that Marinette caught splashback from it, and was suddenly too terrified to turn around and see what he was pointing at. " _The Reaper is here, idiot. You have to run."_

"The…?" A cold hand constricted her vocal chords from within, robbing her of air.

The man swore under his breath at her and sprinted away.

 _The Reaper._

By the time she had finished processing the name, her would-be savior had left her far, far behind. The rest of those fleeing had now cleared the grassy square. They were almost finished disappearing around corners and behind walls and bushes, yet Marinette was left with the distinct feeling that she was _not_ alone. An eerie silence fell in the absence of frightened civilians, and a horrible anxiety began to creep up the back of Marinette's spine, setting her hairs on end. With her heart in her throat, she turned.

Not five feet away stood a lanky shadow of death, cocking its head at her like a stray animal. _Not the Reaper,_ she thought in vague dissociation, while the adrenaline pumping through her veins slowed time to quarter-speed. _The Reaper is dead. This is someone new, and possibly worse. And since Tikki still hasn't chosen anyone new... there's no one who can save me._

The shadow took another step toward her and her eyes flit automatically to his feet, where layers of frost wilted the grass as he walked, crumbling the blades into powdery white dust in his wake. Another step. Marinette stumbled as she lunged backwards on trembling legs, and fell. Of all the times for her to be clumsy, of course it had to be now. Nino was always joking that her headstone would read 'tripped and died.' Would he laugh or cry, later, when he heard that he was right?

The shadow loomed overhead.

A frightened tear slipped from the corner of Marinette's eye and she found that despite her terror she couldn't look away. The soft grass turned cold and brittle on her arms as he crouched down beside her, stabbing her with its microscopic dying blades. When he leaned over her, blacking out all the stars, that was when she knew for sure that she was going to die. Her hands curled into the soil for the very last time.

Warm fingers brushed her temple and moved into her hair, toward her ear. She flinched violently.

But it didn't hurt. Her skin didn't erupt in flame, or flake into ashes, or evaporate as steam.

If anything, it tickled, which was so absurd that she almost thought she'd died after all. But then she felt that pink flower being plucked from behind her earㅡthe one she'd placed there without a second thought, a lifetime ago. She blinked up at the harbinger of destruction in abject shock as he rose to full height again. Here she was at his mercy, and all he'd taken from her was a flower.

He crushed his prize in his hand, letting the petals slip through the cracks in his fingers as smoking ash. Then without any further ado, as if he'd never even seen her there at all, he walked away.

The next breath to hit Marinette's lungs was the sweetest she had ever known. _She was still alive._ As baffling as that was, she didn't have time to dwell, because yet another stranger lunged out of nowhere and seized her by the arm to yank her to her feet.

"Holy sweet mother of fuck," the girl hissed, "I thought you were a _goner_."

Marinette could only blink at the girl. The lingering shock at the worst near death experience of her life was still flooding her senses, numbing her to the sight of the stranger's bouncing auburn hair and thick rimmed glasses that glinted orange in the light of the burning river. Yet, as Marinette's breathing calmed, the dark-skinned stranger inspired a twinge of familiarity. Did she go to Marinette's school maybe?

"What are you even _doing_ here?" the girl pressed.

"Wait, me?" Marinette's jaw flapped in confusion. "What are _you_ doingㅡ Hang on," she said, spying the phone in the stranger's hands, "are you _filming_ this? Are you insane? We need to get out of here, now! Leave the filming to the professionals!"

The girl shook her head and took a tentative step toward the shadow, who was slowly making his way to the base of the Eiffel Tower. A cold pang of dread sluiced through Marinette's stomach. "Do you see any professionals here?" the girl demanded. "This is history in progress and it needs to be documented."

"Not by you," Marinette pleaded. "We're just kids! Please, come with me. We need to run." Before Plagg's newest shadow reached the base of the tower they had to be free of this place. Marinette knew that with a cold sinking certainty.

But the stranger only gave Marinette a cryptic look, strangely akin to disappointment. "Lucas Guillerme was only seventeen years old."

"Fine, stay!" Marinette huffed. "But I'm gone."

As she turned to run, the girl stopped her with a hand on her arm. "Wait," she blurted. "I'm… I don't know if you remember me, cause I'm still new in town. But I'm pretty sure we go to school together." _Oh_ , Marinette realized, _this girl is_ _ㅡ_ "Alya Césaire. If I get myself killed, please tell my family I'm sorry."

Alya didn't wait to hear Marinette's response before taking off toward the base of the tower. Only when she was a good fifty feet away did Marinette see something that made her blood run cold. Rust. Deep red rivers of rust travelled up the legs of the tower like veins, and even as she opened her mouth to scream a warning to Alya, beams as thick as buildings began to snap away near the base, one by one. Alya stopped dead in her tracks on the brittle grass, but it was too late for her. It was too late for both of them.

 _No_ , she thought as the tower thrummed with an ominous vibration that quaked the ground below her feet. _No!_

Her body screamed for flightㅡto sprint away as fast as her legs would carry herㅡwhen the weakening tower shuddered and began to lean toward them. But, _Alya_. She was too close. She was going to die!

As the farthest leg of the tower finally gave way and the monument fell, one desire flooded Marinette from the front of her conscious to the very base of her soul. _Something,_ she prayed desperately. _Give me something to stop this._ _Anything!_

No sooner did this thought fill her mind than it blinded her, searing the world around her with a spill of swirling sunlight, and amidst it all she thought she heard someone whisper, " _Now that's what I'm talking about!"_ The adrenaline already surging through her veins stirred into a frenzy the likes of which she had never known, filling her with the energy of a million stars until it overflowed into the world around her like music, from her eyes and lips and fingertips. For an instant in time, a universe was birthed inside her. And then, just as quickly as it came, the light dimmed.

By the time the spots cleared from her vision, the tower had stopped falling. Marinette blinked, freshly amazed for the second time in ten minutes to still be alive.

But when she looked up she thought perhaps she was dead after all, because her entire reality ceased to make sense. Steel beams as wide around as her parent's bakery rose from the grass at random jutting intervals where previously there had been nothing, all throughout the courtyard in a stonehenge of insane magnitude, spearing the tower. It was utterly destroyed, but it had not fallen. These impossible spikes rising up like iron stalagmites had stopped it halfway down, leaving it at a forty-five degree slant.

And Alya was suddenly in front of her face again, screaming. " _Ange_ ," she was saying. " _Ange, ange, ange!_ Oh my god, you've been _chosen_."

"IㅡI don't understand," Marinette stammered, lifting her arms to shield herself from Alya's onslaught. She gasped as her own arms entered her field of view; sparkles of light trailed off her bare skin, fading into the air like so many spiralling fireflies. "I don'tㅡ"

"Mask," Alya blurted, shoving Marinette's head down as helicopter blades began to thud over the creak of the settling tower and the distant chaotic traffic. "You gotta make a mask!"

" _What the hell are you talking about,"_ Marinette lashed out, trying to shove Alya away. But Alya wasn't having it. She held on tight. Besides, Marinette may have been in shock, but she still knew exactly what was happening and what Alya meant.

"Make a mask _now_ ," Alya hissed, "unless you want to spend the rest of your life as the world's biggest celebrity!"

"I can't," Marinette whimpered, giving up on pretending she didn't know what had happened to her. "I don't know how!" But even as she said this, something satin-soft came to rest around her eyes, leading Alya to pull back with a look of intense, motherly pride.

"Looks like you figured it out."

"Alya," Marinette whispered, wary of the helicopter now circling them overhead. "You don't understand. I can't do this. Why did Tikki pick _me,_ of all people? I'm nothing. I'm no one. _I can't._ "

The grave expression on Alya's face wasn't enough to break through Marinette's borderline hyperventilation, but when two strong, confident hands came to rest on her cheeks and force her to look up into Alya's eyes, Marinette stopped breathing entirely. "If you don't," Alya said, "then who will?"

.

.

The first prick of blood was what finally drew Adrien from the watery darkness. As the knife pressed into his neck, ever so slightly, Adrien tore to the surface of his own mind like a drowning man, blinking up at the girl who had her knee on his heart as if he'd never seen the light of day before, let alone a light as bright as her. It blinded him. His eyes watered, but he couldn't close themㅡcouldn't even blinkㅡbecause he understood with a terrifying clarity that he'd been out for _hours_. He couldn't remember what he had done, but he did remember the spirit of destruction slipping its claws into his mind.

What had he destroyed? How many people had he _killed?_

Had he… had he tried to kill this girl?

"Do it," he whispered, swallowing thickly as the knife pressed even harder into his neck. But it was just her hand twitching in response to his voice. The girl bathed in light was still frozen in place, stark and strange against the night sky above her, her stained-glass ocean eyes boring into his and her lips parting slowly with trepidation. There were certainly worse sights if this was to be his last. Maybe it was the light pouring off her in waves and maybe it was the passion in her eyes, but either way this girl was beautiful. An angel sent to save him from becoming his own worst nightmare. An angel of death. "Please," he begged, "just do it."

What he wasn't expecting was for the knife to leave his throat.

Marinette fell off him, scrambling backwards. The knife clattered to the ground between them.

Adrien sat up, fingers absently fumbling at the smallish cut on his throat. They came away wet, but when he looked down at his hand expecting to see red, he saw only black. Foggy black shadow still shrouded his body from head to toe. The name came to him unbidden, screamed out at him ten thousand times from a haze of overlapping memories that felt more like dreams.

 _Reaper_.

"Why didn't you do it?" he demanded of the girl as he wobbled to his feet, fighting back tears. Didn't she get it? He _had_ to die. The spirit of destruction had _chosen him._

Rising to her feet as an automatic defense mechanism, Marinette had to steady herself on the brick wall. Her muscles screamed for relief and her arms and legs were covered in bruises and scratches. She'd been chasing him for almost two hours now and still had absolutely no idea what she was doing, or how to create even a hundredth of the things she'd heard of Tikki's chosen ones making before. It was a miracle she'd finally managed to corner him without getting herself killedㅡespecially after the harrowing chase had taken them to the rooftops. So why, when she at last had the chance to end it all, _why didn't she do it?_ "I don't know," she whispered, far too quietly for him to hear over the sounds of the panicking city far below them.

"You're supposed to kill me," he shouted, his voice hoarse and strained. "You're the good guy, I'm the bad guy. That's how it works. So just _do it_ already before I go full psychopath again!"

"Stay back!" Marinette warned, her adrenaline kicking back in as he advanced toward her. She summoned a broad two-handed sword out of the evening airㅡone of the only weapons she had figured out how to make so farㅡand swung it in a wild arc.

Despite the fact that he was literally asking for it, Adrien lunged backwards instinctively when the sword slashed through the air toward him. If he had realized where they were he might have been a little more careful with his steps. But he hadn't.

Marinette knew he was going to step off the edge of the roof the second before it happened. It struck her in that instant that his words were just that: words. This boy didn't want to die. When his foot touched nothing his eyes went wide with sudden terror.

A short gasp, then he was gone.

And Marinette, idiot that she was, immediately leapt after him.

A yo-yo. In the mere instant she was allotted to think of something that would save them that she was actually capable of conjuring, a yo-yo was the very first thing to pop into her head. It shot through the night air in a flourish of light; the fat end came out looped to some outcropping on the rooftop and the string end appeared in her right hand, while her left clutched the ankle of the last person in the world she should be saving. The string sliced her palm as they fell and in a panic she whipped her hand out sideways, expanding it into a lattice of similar strings until a full net engulfed them. The net pulled taut and they came to a jarring, abrupt stop four stories from the roof and three stories from the ground. The two of them collapsed then into a painful pile of knees and elbows, knocking their heads together as they settled into the bottom of the net and stretched it to its limit.

"Don't touch me!" Marinette screamed, violently shoving him away. "Get off!"

But Adrien was just as trapped as she was. There was nowhere to go so he just raised his arms to shield himself from her frantic kicks and punches as she struggled to put distance between he and her, which was physically impossible. They were on top of each other, their legs hopelessly tangled.

"I can't!" he shouted back. "Stop! I'm not gonnaㅡ" A random flail connected with the side of his jaw and for a moment he saw stars. "If you don't stop that this thing is going to fall. I swear I won't hurt you!"

"Says the new Reaper," Marinette growled, but her heart wasn't quite in it. She couldn't stop thinking about the shockingly human look in his eyes when they first blinked awake from within that bottomless shadow. He was just a kid. Like her. And even though she was loathe to admit it, he was right. The string that held them aloft was slowly slipping.

She had to calm down and think of a plan.

"What did I do?" he whispered. Marinette's eyes snapped away from the string back toward him, floored at how broken he managed to sound. Was this a trick? Some kind of psychological warfare? "I didn't… hurt anyone, did I?"

"You really don't remember?" she heard herself wondering aloud.

Numbly, Adrien shook his head. The fear she showed at simply being near him was damning, as far as he was concerned. Adrien stared down at the black shadow where his hands were supposed to be. "No. I blacked out."

"Was that supposed to be a _pun?_ " she screeched.

Adrien whipped his head toward her, aghast. "What? _No!_ "

They both stilled as the thin string above the gave an ominous squeak and slipped a couple inches. They shared a look of intense fear. Adrien squirmed until his back was sort of facing her, causing the string to slip a little more. "Hold onto my shoulders," he ordered.

It was Marinette's turn to be aghast. "What? _No!_ "

"We're about to fall!" he shouted. "Just trust me!"

Privately, Marinette thought that Hell had a better chance of holding the next winter olympics than he had of her trusting him. But she didn't want to die, so when the string slipped again she threw her arms around his neck. The net disintegrated under them as he wound his wrists around the string above and made a mad swing for the side of the building.

For a second they were in freefall again.

Time slowed to a crawl as they arced over the sidewalk below, where a car had gone up the curb and crashed into the lobby of the office building.

Then glass dissolved into a billion fragments as they crashed through the window together, rolling and tumbling until finally coming to a stop when they crashed into a cubicle and knocked it over. People flew from the room as if a live grenade had just been chucked inside, and someone pulled a fire alarm on their way out. Safety sprinklers kicked on above the two left behind, showering them with the strangest of rains as the warbling siren filled the room, echoing back from the farthest of cubicles. Marinette pushed herself up onto her knees, pulling a long shard of glass from her forearm before returning her eyes to the shadow that had altered the course of her entire life. Two minutes ago she'd been prepared to kill him. She'd been _about_ to kill him. But then…

Adrien rose to his feet, teetering dangerously to one side and catching himself on a slick, wet desk that sent him falling again into the pile of glass. He furrowed his eyebrows at her as he got to his feet even slower the second time, wanting to be angry but for some reason not able to remember how while he was looking at her. "You should have let me fall," he said.

"Yes," she agreed, and rose to her feet too. The sprinklers plastered her hair to her cheeks and subdued the light rising from her body. "I should have. Although..." she added thoughtfully. What was she supposed to do now? While she was chasing him he had been like a faceless, silent, soulless demon. Then suddenly he was _more_. He had foresty eyes and a voice that sounded lost and against all the odds and despite everything she knew, he had saved her. "I could say the same thing about you," she shot back.

That hit him like an arrow in the heart. She was right; he'd saved her too. What did that mean for him? "I never wanted this," he told her softly. "I'm… I'm not a bad person."

"Just leave," she said numbly, "and never come back."

She didn't know what else she could do besides let him disappear. There was no way she could kill him now, based on what she had seen. The two hour chase flashed through her head in a quick recap; now that she thought about it, despite all the destruction she'd witnessed, not once had she seen him actually _hurt_ another person. And he had saved her life a minute ago _._ It didn't matter if it was her duty or not. She wouldn't kill him. Still, she couldn't help the hopeful plea from taking control of her vocal chords, begging him not to make her do something that would ruin her. Begging him not to raise a hand to her city again.

" _Please_."

Water dripped down Adrien's face, pooling inside his dress shoes underneath all the darkness.

Something about her gave him pause. He knew she was handing him a golden opportunity that he should grasp with both handsㅡthe opportunity of escapeㅡbut for some reason the idea of never seeing this girl again made his stomach turn over. The glowing city behind her paled in comparison. So yes, he paused, because he had never in his life seen anything so awe-inspiring as the girl who'd been chosen by the spirit of creation. The water spraying off her skin mixed with the light of her transformation to form a hazy halo that enveloped her whole body, reflecting deep in her cerulean eyes. Those eyes were the first thing that he'd seen upon waking up, and he knew he'd be seeing them in his dreams for the rest of his life, however long that would be.

Maybe he would never see this girl again. But even so. For this tragic and beautiful speck in time, with all that was left of his heart and soul, Adrien loved her.

* * *

.

.

As someone who adores marichat more than life itself, I hate myself for that flower scene hahaha.

Not sure if it got across, but Adrien didn't hurt a soul during his rampage (at least, not purposefullyㅡthere were accidental injuries, but no one was killed. You'll see some of the aftermath in the next flashback chapter). He was focused exclusively on the destruction of meaningless excess. Wealth and beauty and other such constructs, as ignited in chapter three. All that jazz. Not the destruction of life. _That's_ what sets him apart from Plagg's other recent chosen.

Next chapter we'll be back in the present again. Hoooo boy, be prepared for Adrien and Marinette to meet again so she can return his book.

Two words: coffee date.

Yea boiii. Will I ever stop slingshotting back and forth between extreme angst and extreme fluff? NOPE! Get rekt.


	6. Skydiving Straight Into Hell

Now that this story is really getting going I feel the need to drop a reminder that the rating on this story is FOR SURE going to be bumped up later on. Pls be aware of this~

* * *

 **[Sky Diving Straight Into Hell]**

* * *

Karschi sucked up the last dregs of pureed fruit from the bottom of her cup and chucked it in the trash can before adjusting her glasses with a sigh. She'd landed herself in a bit of a pickle, here.

Scrolling again through the photos that had been delivered to her a few days ago, she had to admonish herself for the hundredth time today. If only she'd opened the email right away, she would have had time to demand a new photoshoot. The specific poses that Converse had requested were all lackluster and boring and/or otherwise ruined by one model or the next. But then, suddenly, at the very end of the shoot, they became amazing. But these last fifteen or so photographs showed two unfamiliar faces, neither of which were in any of the previous photos. Neither model was listed as paid, either, which was incredibly odd, and to top it off someone had embellished the black Converse that the girl was wearing. It was all _very_ unconventional. So if Karschi had the time, she would have requested a new shoot with an entirely fresh cast of models. But her deadline was this afternoon, and she had a job to keep. So she selected the best seven photos of the handsome blonde and the black-haired girl with altered Converse, sent them off to her boss, and hoped that no one really looked twice at those shoes. If they did, she would have to play the 'I didn't see that' card and hope it was enough to keep her out of the doghouse.

At any rate, even if she got in trouble for letting that slip through the cracks, it would be less trouble than she'd get in if she tried to turn in any of those other abysmally drab photographs with the models she had hired. Maybe the two surprise models hadn't been ticketed to appear in the ad, but she counted herself lucky that they'd ended up in there somehow. Without them, the campaign would have been a bust.

 _I'm probably in the clear,_ Karschi told herself as she caught the 4:15 bus. _It's just a small campaign, anyway. These photos are only scheduled to appear in a few magazines and web ads, so the odds of anyone noticing are negligible._

.

 _._

 _(Two weeks later...)_

 _._

 _._

"So. You gonna tell me who the lucky guy is or not?"

Marinette flinched in surprise, smearing a bit of mascara up the side of her temple. Moving fully into the bathroom, Alya stepped in with an apologetic grimace to wet a Q-tip and help clean off the smudge.

"How do you even know I'm going on a date?" Marinette puffed her lip out and allowed Alya to take over the job of doing her eyeliner as well (for Alya was the goddess of perfect eyeliner, and she was sure her own hands were trembling). "I didn't say squat."

"You didn't have to," Alya laughed. "You've changed your outfit like three times since I got here, you know, and you have that look on your face."

" _What_ look?"

The smug curl to Alya's lip told Marinette that she must still have that 'look' on her face.

"It's not a date," she mumbled. "I mean, there's a guy, but it's just gonna be a brief rendezvous. I met him three weeks ago at the photoshoot. He left his book there, so I offered to return it."

"Uh-huh. And where is this rendezvous occurring?"

"...La Tasse."

Alya's lip curled even further.

"Oh, shut up!" Marinette groaned. "Just because we're meeting at a coffee shop doesn't make it a date!"

"Au contraire," Alya purred. "Now come on, love, this dress isn't nearly sexy enough. You're going for the 'make him double-take' vibe. I want you rocking the _'_ knock him flat on his ass' vibe."

"Alya!"

"Yes, listen to Alya," she cooed, and dragged Marinette back to the bedroom to rifle through the closet for that open-backed white number, the one she'd never seen Marinette wear aside from the time when she'd modeled it for the Creativentures catalogue. "Alya knows best."

The ladybug that had been crawling about on the windowpane sprouted into Tikki, and the spirit drifted over to them. "What are you guys doing?"

"We're dressing up Marinette for her _date_ ," Alya sang.

Tikki blinked in surprise, one finger resting on her chin. She caught Marinette's eye and raised an eyebrow, but Marinette dismissed the unasked question with a shake of her head a mouthed _'it's not a date,'_ and focused on picking up the clothes that Alya dropped on the floor as she dug through the closet.

After Marinette broke it off with Chat for good, Alya wasn't sure she would ever love again, the way she'd carried that heartbreak everywhere she went. It didn't matter how many blind dates Alya tried to set her up on or how encouraging she was, or how dutifully Marinette insisted she was over him as the years went on. Marinette just wasn't interested in dating anymore. So this tiny little coffee date that Marinette had so conveniently neglected to mention was a momentous occasion. Her little baby was all grown up and ready to mingle!

"So was he like, the photographer's assistant or something?" Alya wondered idly as hangers screeched along the rack. "Orㅡ" a gleeful thought occurred to her, "ㅡa model, perhaps?" Alya turned to tease her best friend with a toothy grin, only to be shocked by the furious blush dusting Marinette's pale cheeks. "Oh my god, you're seriously going to get coffee with a _model? Holy fuㅡ"_

"Alya, please!" Marinette blurted, stamping her feet with pent up tension. "I'm nervous enough as it is without you going allㅡ all _Alya_ on me!"

Alya dialed back the shit-eating quality of the grin and turned back to the task at hand. That sounded like a 'yes.'

 _Model or not,_ Alya thought as she finally found the dress she'd been searching for, _this guy_ _must be something damn special to break this four year streak of self-enforced solitude._

Marinette squeaked, eyeing the white sundress that Alya pulled out with a triumphant whoop, which ended above the knee and would leave almost her entire back revealed, while white lace stretched from the deep _V_ of the neckline all the way up to a loop made to button around the backside of the neck. Marinette suddenly regretted ever making this dress. "Really?" she said. " _This_ one?"

Alya shoved it into Mari's arms. "This one."

Tikki giggled and pressed a hand to her cheek. "Well, date or not," she said, "the guy isn't gonna know what hit him."

.

.

Alone at a glass table set on wrought-iron legs inside _La Tasse sans Fond_ , Adrien watched the door with his heart in his throat.

He was restless.

He was elated.

He was terrified.

He'd been looking forward to this every second of every day since she'd sent him that message on facebook, that _(yes)_. Was he underdressed? It wasn't technically a date, he supposed, but… he straightened the collar on his powder blue button-up for what felt like the hundredth time, foot tapping so rapidly that the chair opposite him at the table jiggled in response. How were you even supposed to dress for an occasion like this when it was kind of a date but not really and it was a pretend-second-meeting but really she was your ex and the love of your life and your partner and your other half andㅡ

When she appeared on the other side of the glass wall where the words _La Tasse sans Fond_ showed through backwards in chalk paint, he forgot how to breathe.

The entry bell jingled.

"Marinette!" The chair scraped loudly in his haste to stand, and he was sure her cheeks pinkened when she saw him. "H-hi."

"Hello, A-Adrien."

She smiledㅡthe tiniest, shyest thing. 'Ladybug' and 'shy' were two words he never thought he'd think about in relation to each other. For a moment they simply stared at each other, each wondering what the hell they were supposed to say next, until a new customer entered the shop behind Marinette, forcing them to sit back down at Adrien's table in order to clear the aisle for walking space.

"Here," Marinette said timidly, and reached into her bright red purse to procure his book. Honestly, Adrien could kiss himself for forgetting it that day, since his forgetfulness had led to this moment. "I hope you don't mind, but I…" Pushing it across the table toward him, Marinette blinked at him contritely. "I sort of read it."

"Oh?" Despite ten years of gushing and obsessing about the genre he'd never managed to get Ladybug interested in science-fiction, so this was an interesting development. More than interesting. "The whole thing?"

"Um… yeah," she giggled. "I actually really liked it."

"Which was your favorite?" he pressed excitedly, unable to tone it down.

"The one where it turns out it was just bees all along, of course. I don't remember what it was called, but _definitely_ the one with the bees."

"Oh my god," Adrien deadpanned. "Youㅡ" His voice caught in his throat. _You would,_ he'd been about to say. _You're a predictable little bug, my lady, and your carefully-guarded secret love of memes is showing._

But she was not Ladybug, and he was not Chat, and Adrien was not supposed to know anything about Marinette.

"...You would love some of his other short story collections then," he said instead. "There's a lot of funny ones like that. Oh!" he realized, and rose from his chair abruptly. "Where are my manners? What would you like to drink? Are you a coffee person?" What he really wanted to ask was _'one or two shots of espresso in your hot cafe mocha?'_ "I want to get you something as a thanks for returning my book."

But instead of answering him, Marinette shot out of her seat. "Oh my gosh, no! I'm the one who should be thanking _you!_ Without you my photo shoot would have gone up in flames," she insisted, and she was sure she saw the 'pun-pending' sparkle in Adrien's eyes that she was so used to in Chat's. "Don't pull the gentleman card. I can see what you're thinking but I won't take no for an answer." Walking straight to the counter meant he could do nothing but follow her and tell her his coffee order with an amused smile. It was more than just magical to see Ladybug's fierce drive at work in such a small, unassuming setting.

It was dangerous, because it made him curious.

It made him want more.

.

.

Alya was sitting on Marinette's couch uploading a backlog of fresh photos to the Creativentures inventory when the alert pinged on her phone.

A break was probably in order anyway. She snagged her cola from the counter and settled back to open the photo Nathaniel had sent her. The caption was short. ( _Is this who I think it is?)_

The photo he'd sent her looked to be a hastily snagged passing shot of a subway ad near a stairwell; some sort of cheesy clothing ad or something, where a girl and a guy looked lovingly into each others' eyes in a sun-soaked garden, his arms around her waist and she standing on her toes like she was about to kiss him. When Alya zoomed in on the faces, she gasped, inhaling a big gulp of soda.

 _Marinette?_

For the last thirty minutes Tikki had been standing in front of Marinette's Idea Wall (twenty cork board squares that were littered with half-developed clothing designs and one big whiteboard covered in hastily scrawled garments) and trying each design out in turn, crafting them onto her body with light. A colorful jumper had just taken the place of a pantsuit when Alya's abrupt choking caught her attention. With one swift glide, Tikki was across the room and floating upside-down in the air above her chosen's best friend, pressing in so close that their noses would have touched if Tikki was capable of touching anything.

"Are you okay?" Tikki wondered. "I'll admit my knowledge on soda is limited, but I don't think you're supposed to breathe it in."

Alya simply shook her head, still coughing up spritz as she threw her phone aside to pull up google on her computer. It was obvious what had happened. Marinette ended up actually modeling in that shoot somehow. But why didn't she _say anything_ about it? What the hell? What was going on? A quick search turned up a bunch of recent Converse ads, and lo and behold, there was Marinette, lording it up in the photographer's garden with a sinfully beautiful model.

"Oh!" Tikki gasped, having settled now directly onto Alya's lap to see what she was freaking out over. "Oh wow, Marinette didn't say that they used her in some of the photos! I wonder why she didn't mention it. Maybe it was supposed to be a surprise?" A flashy smile spread across the spirit's face. "Aw, she looks so gorgeous," Tikki glowed, "don't you think, Alya?"

"Yeah," Alya rasped, her fingers trembling on the keyboard.

As amazing as this was, there were a few glaringly real problems here that Alya just couldn't reconcile, and she bit her lip as they flashed through her mind. (1) Why hadn't Marinette said anything about this? Shouldn't she have been so excited she couldn't contain herself? The girl had always been terrible at saving surprises, and unwilling to even try now that she was an adult. Last year she gave Alya her birthday present three months in advance because she couldn't wait. (2) Having done group video projects with her in lycee and having taken dozens of photographs of the girl herself, Alya knew better than anyone in the world how god awful Marinette was at acting. Yet, somehow, these photos were flawless. She and this other model just fit together in frame as if no one was acting at all. And maybe he was a model... but Marinette? No. Just no. It was weird. It was impossible. And that begged (3), the third red flag. The biggest of them all. It was more than a red flag, it was more like a jolly roger on the horizon screaming _disaster, disaster, disaster._

Alya had seen that look on Marinette's face before, hundreds of times.

And she could still recall the very first time she'd seen that wistful, bashful, _hopeful_ expression on her best friend's face with painstaking clarity. It was back when they were just sixteen; still kids together.

 _"Please don't be mad,"_ Marinette had blurted out of nowhere one day.

 _"Mad?"_ Alya had wondered then. _"Why would I be mad? Wait, what did you do, Mari?"_

 _"We… I mean, I..."_ she said cautiously, switching from fidgety to staring softly into the distance. _"Alya, I think I'm in love with him."_

Gobsmacked by the out-of-the-blue confession, Alya had followed her best friend's line of sight to a billboard across the street, where a graffiti artist had covered half an ad for a local hotel with the spray painted likeness of Ladybug and Chat Noir. Understanding washed over her then, and when she looked back at Marinette, it was to see that she was lost to the world, still gazing up at the billboard with lovelorn thoughtful longing.

Alya had never seen Marinette look at _anyone_ the way she looked at Chat Noir.

So, there was really only one thing that brought sense to this puzzle.

.

.

As Adrien and Marinette moved toward the end of the counter while the barista finished making their drinks, Marinette's phone buzzed in her pocket. She was usually the sort of person that put her phone out of reach when in the company of others, but when it buzzed for the sixth time, interrupting her mid-sentence, Adrien laughed and suggested she check it.

Four texts from Alya, two from Nino.

 _(WHAT THE FUCKKKKKKKKK!)_ was all the first one from Alya said. Oh no. This did not bode well.

 _(MARINETTE WHY DIDNT YOU SAY ANYTHING! WQHAT IN THE ACTUAL HELL. I HAD TO HEAR IT FROM NATHANIEL VIA SNAPCHAT?)_

 _(and i am NOT an idiot, ive known you for ten years! did you think i wouldnt recognize that LOOK on your face? Call me IMMEDIATELY)_

 _(i KNOW youre with him right now. i hope you know what youre doing. jesus h christ marinette)_

Marinette's heart stuttered at that last one, and she numbly accepted the steaming ceramic mug that Adrien was offering her, barely noticing the concerned furrow to his eyebrows as she poured over her phone. The two texts from Nino were a lot less psychotic, but they hit her even harder than all of Alya's combined.

 _(Dude,)_ he said. _(Alya's losing her shit and she wants me to go pick you up. You know I trust your decisions and I know this sounds totally nuts, so I understand if you just laugh at me for even checking. But still. What Alya's saying is freaking me the fuck out. That guy in the ad…. that you're on a date with right now..)_

 _(Is it him?)_

 _The ad,_ Marinette thought with detached horror. The ad must have dropped. And, in typical Alya fashion, the girl had instantly connected the dots. Fuck. When she looked back up to laugh off the flurry of texts and pretend nothing was wrong, it was to the sight of Adrien staring at his phone with a reflection of her horror.

"I think the ad went up," he said, and a nervous chuckle slipped in at the end.

"Ye-yeah," she agreed. _And my friends might be worried that Plagg is trying to murder me as we speak._

"I'm so sorry, Marinette, but I think I have to leave."

They had just barely made it back to their own table, and Adrien set his full mug down and followed the clink with a frustrated muss of his hair. The gesture screamed 'Chat.' Who was she kidding, everything about him screamed 'Chat.'

"I didn't tell anyone about the photoshoot, and my father…" He trailed off, wondering if it was worth it to bother trying to explain the complexity of the situation to Marinette when Ladybug already knew all about Chat's home life.

"It's alright," Marinette assured him. "My friends are freaking out and demanding I come home anyway. Maybe we can walk together to the subway?"

"Yeah," he brightened. "Yeah, okay."

In the end they got to-go cups for their coffees and emerged into the late afternoon, golden with sun rays that sailed straight through the paper-thin cloud cover. It should have been strange, walking together in broad daylight without masks or code names or armor of light and shadow. But instead it felt like the most natural thing. Adrien had been fantasizing about this moment for the better part of ten years, and now that it had arrived it went so quickly. No sooner had they emerged into the sun than they had reached the entrance to the subway at the end of the street. Adrien slid his subway card at the meter and followed her in, despite the fact that Gabriel's last text had said, _(The car is on its way)._

The subway station smelled of musk and earth, as usual, and every inch was flooded in white fluorescent light.

"This is me," Marinette said after a few minutes of uncertain silence and stair-descending, pointing up at the sign ahead on the wall. "Where are you heading?"

"Oh!" Adrien's hand snaked to the back of his neck and he struggled to control the blush that threatened its reappearance every time she opened her mouth to speak. "I'm actually… not taking the subway," he chuckled. "My father's sending a car to pick me up. He goes all _Godfather_ on me when I 'defy' him so it's really easier to accept the ride, especially when he's already pissed at me. I just wanted to walk you here. Is that okay?"

"Of course," Marinette smiled, but then stopped dead in her tracks. "Oh my god."

"What? What's wroㅡ Ahh."

There on the wall across from the cavernous subway track, was evidence that the ad had indeed gone up.

Tears stung at Marinette's eyes as she looked at the huge ad, proclaiming _Converse_ loudly in the bottom right corner but leaving the rest of the ad space for her and Adrien. Of course they had to pick that picture. The 'almost kiss' where Dennis had goaded them into betraying the deepest fathoms of their hearts. She looked first at her own likeness, hating herself for blowing apart her carefully raised walls of defense in a moment of pure insanity. Then she looked at Adrien's likeness, and was forced to immediately look awayㅡonly to find that his real life counterpart was still standing to her left, and was making the same exact face at her now.

"Marinette?" he breathed. "Can I see you again?"

Her breath caught in her throat.

"Please," he whispered, but faltered when she stepped away from his reaching hand. He looked down at it in surprise where it hung stretched out in the air between them, a few inches from her face; he didn't even remember moving it in the first place.

"I'm sorry. We can't." Marinette's eyes stayed glued to the grimy concrete as a high-pitched squeal echoed out from the dark, preceding the train that would take her away from him. "You don't want to date me anyway," she giggled, but it sounded forced. "I'm crazy."

"I love crazy. I _thrive_ in crazy."

The train eked to a stop and after some people had disembarked, the milling Parisians that surrounded them in the tunnel began to load on. "Goodbye, Adrien," she said, and he knew her well enough to recognize that she'd chosen the word 'goodbye' on purpose.

Adrien, however, refused to return it.

 _Oh please, my lady. I'll see you at patrol,_ he wanted to tease, and something told him that even though he held his tongue, Marinette read the words on his face anyway.

.

.

"You wanted to see me?" Nathalie announced, the moment she had entered Gabriel's office. But it was only a formality. She knew precisely why she had been summoned, and had been preparing for this inevitable conversation ever since Adrien warned her with a text twenty minutes ago.

 _(Hiii Nat. So, please don't be pissed, but I may have modeled for an ad on a whim,)_ the text had read. _(And it may have turned out to be a WAY bigger deal than I thought it would be. I was kinda hoping no one would notice. Dumb, I know. I'm coming over right now to handle the fallout, but if you have to go into the ring with my father before I get there, I'm sorry. Photographer: Dennis McCorkle. Brand: Nike (Converse, specifically). I'll explain better when I see you! [] [] [] [] [] [])_ Her all-business phone didn't support emojis, but she was sure they were hearts or kissy-faces or cats of some kind.

That kid was damn lucky she loved him like a little brother, because right now, she wanted to strangle him.

Gabriel looked up at Nathalie from his place at his desk, pressing his fingertips together. "Why wasn't I informed that Adrien wanted back into the business?"

"I don't think he does," she said honestly. As frustrated as she was at Adrien's unpredictable whims, she would have to do something _very_ nice for him in return for the heads-up about this. At least she had her footing now, as opposed to being blindsided. Where Gabriel was concerned, that was the difference between keeping your job and losing it to the next person in line. "As far as I know, he was still insistent that he was never coming back. In fact, we spoke of the matter not two weeks ago and he was still holding the same position. I wouldn't conclude that he wanted back in without speaking to him first, if I were you," she advised.

If any of his other subordinates spoke so frankly you could bet they'd be out on their ass in seconds. But in the years since Jacqueline's death, Gabriel had come to depend on Nathalie not only as his personal assistant but as a stand-in advisor in matters of the heart, especially those concerning his son. Not that she knew her opinions' true magnitude; he was the quiet sort of listener. But she had come to understand by now that she could say almost anything without fear of repercussion.

"Hmm," was all he said in response.

Gabriel reconsidered the matter with this new piece of information, his eyes flitting back to his computer screen, where he had compiled all existing results from Adrien's secret photoshoot. The topmost tab on his browser was the front page of the Converse website, where his son stood opposite a lovely young girl, each drowning in the semblance of wistful passion. It was typical of Converse to play up the 'youthful romance' angle.

It was _not_ typical of Adrien to randomly take a modeling job.

"Do you know who this model is?" he wondered.

Nathalie shifted on her highheels, frowning. She didn't have to go and look at the computer monitor Gabriel was staring at to know who he meant. She too had been intrigued by her. "I spoke with the photographer a few minutes ago and, as I understand it, the girl is not a model. She was the designer for the clothes used in the ad, and due to a mishap with the other models she became a stand-in. Adrien was not scheduled to appear in the shoot either, but he happened to stop by and was roped into it as well."

That broke through Gabriel's usual stoic expression. His eyebrows arched, his lips pursing with curiosity. "Roped in?" he repeated incredulously. If it was truly that easy he would have had Adrien back in the business five years ago, the very instant he first quit.

Nathalie cleared her throat. "In the words of M. McCorkle."

"Ah," Gabriel deadpanned. "Dennis." When Gabriel Agreste chose to roll his eyes, it was a calculated expression that utilized his entire body and showed utter disdain in a way that made Nathalie hope that he never rolled his eyes like that when saying _her_ name.

"Apparently Adrien was merely doing the girl a favor by appearing," Nathalie elaborated, "and M. McCorkle warned me that it was a one time thing, and not to expect a return to modeling for Adrien anytime soon."

"Interesting." Gabriel returned his attention to the ad, taking further note of the clothes the girl had designed. "Does he know her?"

Clearing her throat again, Nathalie straightened. "Unclear."

 _He must,_ Gabriel thought. He'd been so willfully insistent on the permanence of his retirement that it would have taken something monumental to convince him to model again, even the once. "He must know her," Gabriel muttered, more to himself than to Nathalie. "Why else would he do this?"

 _That is a great question,_ Nathalie agreed. "Apologies, Gabriel, but I… I really don't know."

Gabriel only hummed again, thoughtfully, as he narrowed his eyes at the look on Adrien's face. There was a stricken longing there of a breed that he had never before seen in his son's eyesㅡnot everㅡnot in a thousand different photoshoots. Adrien had always been a good actor. But, suspension of disbelief had it's limits. His eyes fell on the girl, then, and the tiniest seed of suspicion took root in his mind.

"Find out."

.

.

Despite what she'd told Adrien, Marinette did not go straight home. She got off the subway five stops early in favor of prolonging The Last Mile, so that by the time she turned her key in her apartment door to face the music, the sun was well out of the sky. Before she'd even finished turning it, Alya ripped the door open from the inside.

"I'm started to regret giving you a key," Marinette deadpanned, pretending not to notice that Alya had still not come down from her panic-induced fury. "You totally abuse it."

"You two have fun," Alya called over her shoulder at Nino and Tikki. "Marinette and I are gonna take a walk. A long, long walk," she hissed under her breath after clicking the door shut behind her.

Only when Marinette had been dragged all the way back down the staircase she'd only just climbed did she speak. "Tikki doesn't know, does she?"

"No," Alya said after a squinty, furious huff. "I didn't say anything and I don't think she had any idea who it was making heart eyes at you in that picture. She was just excited for you. It was really him, wasn't it? I'm right, aren't I?" Marinette tapped her fingers together, trailing after Alya as she stomped into the central courtyard of her apartment complex in no particular direction, waving her hands to and fro. "And you went on a date with him! I cannot _believe_ you would do something so, so reckless! It's so completely unlike you! _I don't love him anymore, Alya,"_ she quoted back at Marinette with fiery insistence. _"It's over for good this time, Alya. I promise I'm not lying to you, Alya._ And then you meet him in real life and the first thing you do is freaking, go on a date with him? Of all the stupid, idiotic, dangerousㅡ"

"First of all!" Marinette shouted, and then reigned in her voice lest it echo up from the courtyard and draw Nino and Tikki's attention. "First of all, it was not a date. I told you that. And Plagg wasn't there, _obviously!_ His life works the same way mine does, Al, he only calls Plagg when he needs him. Plagg doesn't just follow him everywhere he goes. He can't."

"That is not a guaranteed safety net," Alya shot back. "This is worse than playing with fire; this is like sky diving straight into hell."

 _"You think I don't know that?"_ Marinette shouted, back to full volume again, her chest hitching as the emotional toll of the day caught up with her and threatened to bowl her over. _"That doesn't make shutting him out any easier!"_

"Hey!" Alya backpedaled furiously when she realized that Marinette was on the verge of hyperventilating. "Hey, shh, I'm sorry Mar. I didn't mean to yell. I just…" Marinette didn't react when Alya gripped her shoulders, so she steered her away from the center of the courtyard to take a seat at the edge of the stone fountain near the outer rim. "Listen," she said, her voice exuding calm and serenity in an attempt to make up for her verbal assault. "You know I like Chat Noir. You know that. I believed in him almost as early as you did, remember? The Ladyblog _named him._ They were still calling him Reaper back then."

Marinette sniffed and returned Alya's playful shoulder with one of her own, albeit weaker. "I remember."

"But I named you too, honey, and I like you more." Whenever Alya took Marinette's face in her hands, Marinette was forced to remember the day she got her powers. The day they met. The day that Alya kicked her ass into gear. "You're my best friend," Alya sighed. "I don't want to see you hurt again, and you're in danger of more than just a broken heart if you venture any farther into this minefield."

Marinette opened her mouth to reply, but was interrupted by the buzzing of her phone. "Sorry," she murmured as she pulled it from her pocket. "It's been ringing off the hook all afternoon. Let me justㅡ Wait, it's Converse. Hello?" She gave Alya an apologetic grimace before scampering away with the phone pressed to her ear.

Alya was left alone to dip her fingers into the water behind her, and eye the shiny pennies at the bottom of the fountain.

It was a solid ten minutes before Marinette stopped wandering circles around the perimeter of the courtyard and came back. "Theywannabuymydesign!" she gasped.

Alya gaped at her jittering friend. This was a huge turnaround from weepy, forlorn Marinette. She looked like she was about to blast off into space. "I'm sorry, what?"

"Converse wants to buy _my_ design! Theyㅡ it turns out the ad sort of slipped through the cracks? On accident? Because of my converse. You know, the ones I stitched flowers on? And apparently the ad went sorta viral because of the shoes and now they're getting flooded for requests for them except they don't exist so Converse wants to _buy the design from me so they can sell it!_ "

Alya's jaw dropped as she finally processed what Marinette was saying. "Hoooooly..."

"I know!" Marinette squealed. "I'll have to go down there to work out the details but this might be the most exciting thing to happen so far in my career! I can't believe this is happening! Oh, hang on, they're calling me back. Hello?"

 _"Have I reached Mmse. Dupain-Cheng?"_

"Speaking!"

 _"Hello,"_ the voice went on, and Marinette realized it was not the same voice as the representative she'd just spoken to. She pulled the phone away from her face to see 'unknown number,' and put it back to her ear just in time to hear, _"ㅡlie Sanceour, calling on behalf of Gabriel Agreste. Can I borrow a moment of your time?"_

Her mouth went dry and she gave Alya a fleeting look of sheer unadulterated panic before answering. "Yes?" she said, and somehow managed to make it sound like a question.

 _"Great. Well, I'm sure you are a busy woman, with all the publicity you've gotten today, but my boss has informed me that he admires your creative vision and would like to offer you a contracted position here at Gabriel. Are you interested?"_

Marinette turned to Alya again, as she always did when she was caught in a panic with no clue what to do, even though she knew Alya couldn't hear the woman on the phone. Marinette had always been a 'make it on your own or not at all' kind of woman. But… the very real prospect of working under her greatest inspiration was simply too monumental to pass up. It didn't matter that he was Chat's father. Didn't matter that he'd ruined Chat's life. Didn't matter that if she said yes, she would likely see Adrien ten thousand more times than she'd meant to today when she told him goodbye.

Okay, it mattered. It mattered a _lot._

Yet when she opened her mouth to say no, the word that slipped out was, "Yes."

* * *

.

.

The plot thickens.

Get ready for another flashback chapter. HOOOO BOY I'M SO EXCITED TO WRITE THIS NEXT ONE YOU GUYS. It's been beating me over the heart with an umbrella for like three months. Cough cough, _**umbrella**_.

(that sound you hear in the distance is me, eternally screaming)

Also yeah, La Tasse sans Fond (French for 'The Bottomless Mug') is a recurring setting I've grown sentimentally attached to, for some unfathomable reason. You may have seen it in before in another story of mine: _Double Entendre._ If this chapter didn't have quiiite enough 'coffee date' for your tastes, I would highly suggest checking out that other story haha.


	7. Ladybug and Chat Noir

IMPORTANT NOTE! With the help of a very awesome beta reader (thank you rijstkokerwritings/ming85) I have, for lack of a better word, revamped Tikki's character in this au. She was the only part of this story that I didn't really have a proper grasp on, but now I definitely do. So I've (minorly) rewritten her previous scenes, and her future scenes will be a bit more… well, you'll see. Sorry to retro-edit on you guys. I would normally never do that but this story will be better for it. If you're curious and wanna reread Tikki's scenes with their new touched-up flair, she can be found at the very end of Ch1, at the very beginning of Ch4, and in the direct middle of Ch6.

Another flashback chapter. Longest chapter yet BY FAR, but I'm sure you guys love long ass chapters.

* * *

 **Ladybug and Chat Noir**

* * *

 _(Ten years ago…)_

* * *

 _Two weeks._

In the master-bathroom mirror Gabriel stared himself down with purple canyons beneath his eyes, unwilling to do anything more to prepare for the day beyond getting dressed and splashing his face with cold water. He looked as gaunt and lifeless as he felt.

 _Two weeks my wife has been dead._

Gabriel leaned over the counter as the wave of agony washed over him afresh, and waited it out as best he could. It was the same every morning. A few minutes alone in the privacy of his own room as he came to terms with reality. When he finally emerged from his bedroom it was to the sight of his barely-in-her-twenties assistant waiting patiently with a cup of coffee and a newspaper, leaning against the wall with her eyes on the front article.

"Good morning, sir," she said, and straightened instantly When she had handed over his coffee and paper, she lingered. A question tugged at her lips.

"Yes?" he said dismissively.

Still, she hesitated. "Chloe Bourgeois came by again this morning. Is Adrien still…?" Nathalie bit her lip, unsure how to even phrase the awkward question. She hadn't seen head or tail of Adrien Agreste since the day of the funeral when he'd disappeared into his roomㅡthe day the spirit of destruction reappeared out of nowhere and shook Paris to its core. No one but his father had seen Adrien, and Gabriel had been directing her to turn away any and all visitors or friends or tutors that sought after him, even that blonde huffy model girl.

"I'm afraid so," Gabriel answered tiredly. "Adrien is not yet ready to return to his studies, nor is he interested in visitors. I will inform you when he is. Please assume until further notice that he will not be seeing anyone."

"Please sir," Nathalie implored, running to catch up with Gabriel, who had begun the brief trek to his office. (It was a lot closer in this temporary rental where he'd taken up residence after the Agreste mansion had burned down. Contrary to the world-famous mansion, this gingerbread-style house in the hills was only two stories and two bedrooms, with one office upstairs. Anything larger would have magnified the echoing loneliness he felt into something unmanageable.) "If I could speak frankly for just a momentㅡ"

"You may not."

"It's not healthy for Adrien toㅡ"

"Mlle. Sanceourㅡ"

"I don't care if you fire me!" Nathalie exploded, an out of character action which startled the detached Gabriel so thoroughly that he spilled half his coffee down his black button-up. "Just _listen!_ I may not have been here long, but you ignored Adrien for three straight days after Jacqueline's death," (Gabriel cringed away from her at this point, but she was undeterred), "and he was hurt so badly by that and then the world went to _shit_ and he must feel so _lost_ and _alone_ and I just, I'm worried about him, sir. It's not healthy for him to isolate himself this way. Please, tell him to come out of his room. _Please_."

Normally a speech such as this would have awoken Gabriel's fury. But as it was, Nathalie's righteous wrath served only to remind him of his late wife. His Jacqueline. She would get so up in arms over Adrien, sometimes…

After a cautious clearing of the emotion from his throat, he answered, "Thank you for your concern, but I promise you that I am far more worried about Adrien than you are. And I mean that in the sincerest possible way. I am doing everything I can."

"It's been two weeks," Nathalie repeated, her feet stuck in place on the floorboards as Gabriel resumed the walk to his office.

"I know," Gabriel replied ruefully, though mostly to himself.

 _Two weeks my son has been missing._

 _Two weeks I've lied to the world about his whereabouts for fear of connecting him to his crimes._

 _Two weeks I've pretended not to know that he too has been taken from me._

Gabriel had just turned the silver handle on his office door when a crash sounded up from the stairwell, like ceramic shattering against hardwood. "Adrien!" he heard Nathalie gasp, and Gabriel's heart may have stopped. It was on nerveless legs that he carried himself to the top of the stairs to look down from the balcony onto the spacious front room. Downstairs, Adrien stood in the open front door as if he had never left, silhouetted in shades of gold against the glaring morning light that peeked into the foyer from beyond the hills.

A flickering image of the _The Pieta_ flashed in Gabriel's mind, stained forever now by shadow and fire.

"I didn't know you went out!" Nathalie was spluttering. "I didn't even see you come out of your room. But I'm so glad you're finally up and about! Can I make you something? Anything? What do you like for breakfast? I'm afraid I'm not much for cooking, but I can try…"

Adrien was the picture of confusion and anxiety as Nathalie fussed over him and tugged him inside to shut the front door. He had no idea what she was talking about. Didn't she know he'd been MIA for fifteen and a half consecutive days? Shouldn't she _suspect him_ of being the Reaper? After the angel girl had let him go, he'd granted her wish. The plan was to disappear forever. In fact he'd gotten as far as St. Petersburg before a haggard picture of his father had caught his eye on the news and dragged him by the heart all the way back home. After the initial terrifying check to see if he'd killed anyone, whereupon he'd discovered with incredulity that not a single fatality had occurred, he was sure that the fact of his disappearanceㅡthe _only_ disappearanceㅡwould have implicated him as the culprit beyond a shadow of a doubt. It was practically suicide to come back here.

So why on Earth was Nathalie behaving as though he'd never been gone?

"Adrien," Gabriel said from halfway down the stairs. He'd meant it to sound stern, or authoritative. But it came out all wrong. Like a question. A plea.

Adrien didn't know what to say. What was there to say? He didn't even know why he'd come home. He was still convinced he was supposed to die that day at the hands of that girl, and that everything beyond that shimmering minute when he'd first opened his eyes to the feeling of steel on his throat was stolen time. He knew he looked like quite a sight. He'd never looked _less_ like an Agreste than in this moment, disheveled and dirty and still dressed in the warmer layers that Northern Europe had called for, and wearing a backpack with a dormant evil spirit inside.

"Père," he began uncertainly.

"Thank you for joining us." Gabriel cut off whatever Adrien was about to say as he crossed the room toward his son. "I was beginning to fear you would never emerge from your bedroom again."

"My…?" Adrien frowned, eyeing Nathalie in the kitchen where she was rummaging through the fridge. If she'd noticed that he was dressed for travel, she hadn't let on. "My room?"

"You'll want to call Mlle. Bourgeois, as she came by again just this morning to see how you were feeling. We told her you would call her when you were ready."

Something warm blossomed in Adrien's chest as his father's pointed expression finally struck a noteㅡa string that hung dead-center between pain and happiness. His father _knew_. Yet, despite the overwhelming tidal wave of reasons not to, against all rational thought, Gabriel's response to that knowledge had been to cover up his son's tracks, and not to write him off or rat him out or disown him. Adrien threw himself at Gabriel before he had even finished registering the fact that his father knew and still loved him anyway. _His father knew and still loved him anyway._

Gabriel stumbled backwards at the sudden weight, but wrapped his arms around his son. _"I'm sorry,"_ Adrien sobbed, _"I'm sorry, papa. I didn't mean to, I'm so sorry."_

"We will get through this," Gabriel assured him, and he could have been talking about Jacqueline's death for all Nathalie knew, who had gone very still in the kitchen between one moment and the next. "We always do."

.

.

For six solid months after the attack ( _Le Jour de L'incendie,_ they were calling it) Marinette travelled around the city after school in her full transformation (more often than not with Alya tagging along and filming), fixing the disaster her enemy had left behind. That first day, as she fought to stop that boy, creation had been an unwieldy weapon she was powerless to control. It seemed completely random, the things she was able to create versus the things that refused to materialize no matter how hard she envisioned them appearing in her hands.

"You can only create things that you understand," Tikki had explained that first night, as Marinette relived the battle in a twisting nightmare and woke sweating and gasping to find her new spirit laying next to her in bed.

"Wh-what?" With the nightmare still encroaching on her reality and sleep still heavy on her eyelids, Marinette pushed herself up onto her elbows.

"You talk in your sleep," Tikki said softly. The spirit lit her dark attic bedroom like the full moon at its zenith. "You were talking about the pistol you tried to make while we were chasing them through the city today."

 _We. Them._ It was hard for Marinette to accept that today's battle was really two on two when she had felt so utterly alone with that boy. The moment when she tried to make a gun was a moment of insanity; he'd almost touched her with those deadly hands of his, and she was scared. Desperate to bring the fight to an end. But instead of the pistol that she was imagining, the thing that had landed in her hands was a _squirt gun_. Maybe that would be funny in retrospect, a few years down the line. But in the battle today it had been terrifying; a horrific reminder that she had no freaking clue what she was doing.

"The reason it didn't work is because you don't know what a gun is made out of," Tikki went on. As the spirit spoke, she waved her hand in the air above them, sending a wave of light off her hand into the dark and morphing it into the shape of a handgun. As Marinette watched the lightshow in awe, the gun fractured and separated into several dozen geometric shapes."There are so many different kinds of metal involved in a tool like this, and tiny intricate mechanisms. It's a sum of parts. To create something like this you first need to know what kinds of metal to create, and how they fit together."

Fascinating. None of Tikki's previous chosen had ever spoken much of the actual process involved in the art of creation. Marinette had never expected it to be so scientific. "So that's why I had no problems making swords," she realized. They hadn't been artisan by any means, but they were sharp, and that's all that had mattered.

"Exactly. Or that yo-yo," Tikki added, and the shining gun components merged to shift into a little yo-yo that spun in the air above them.

Marinette glanced at the spirit, trying to decipher the faraway expression on her face as she played with the yo-yo made of light. She hadn't commented yet on Marinette's decision to let the boy go; instead she'd spent the evening introducing herself and comforting Marinette as she soaked in the traumatizing events of the day.

"I'm sort of glad I didn't figure out the gun, anyway," Marinette murmured. "I just panicked. I don't think I could ever shoot anyone, even to protect myself." _Not even him._

"Maybe not to protect yourself. But you'll be surprised at the things you're capable of in the name of protecting the innocent." The yo-yo twisted shape again, and in its place was a familiar pink flower. Tikki beckoned it toward her and poked it, whereupon it rippled like water and dissolved into the air. The room darkened a few shades in its absence. "Their powers don't work like ours, Marinette. They can destroy anything they want without understanding it at all."

The warning in Tikki's voice was clear.

Once Marinette started reading up on architecture and requested in depth blueprints and photographs of the buildings and public spaces she was repairing, Paris embarked on its long, slow recovery. It was taxing, and she didn't do it alone. Construction companies handled the brunt of the footwork, while she focused on the more artistic features that the boy with the green eyes had destroyed. The things only she could fix.

As she worked, she wondered. She thought about the fear and confusion in his eyes when he said, _I blacked out._ How much of this destruction was the boy, and how much was Plagg?

Her parents figured out that she was the new conduit for the spirit of creation on the second week. As hard as she'd tried to keep it a secret from them during her waking hours, she had a penchant for creating things in her sleepㅡnamely pink flowers that spilled out through the trap door onto the stairs. It was probably better that they knew, though, since she would be spending every moment of her free time for the next six months restoring the city. Her thorough absence from home would have been impossible to explain.

The second sighting of the boy (she _refused_ to call him Reaperㅡshe didn't care what anyone else called him but she wouldn't assign the name of a dead mass murderer to a boy who hadn't killed anyone) passed uneventfully. She woke to a call from Alya at six in the morning almost four weeks after _Le Jour de L'incendie,_ informing her that he'd been spotted in an alley downtown. He touched nothing and spoke to no one and vanished again into the night.

Apparently.

Even after the fourth sighting, Marinette was convinced that the hype was mere paranoia from scared citizens. That was, until the fifth sighting.

The fifth sighting was Marinette's.

When it happened, she was following a young boy that had been possessed by an adrenaline spirit. The spirit was benign and the boy no more than an energetic troublemaker, but she still had to ensure he didn't accidentally hurt himself (or anyone else) while the possession ran its course. She was about to take action and attempt to remove the spirit herselfㅡsomething Tikki had explained to her but she had been nervous to tryㅡwhen she saw the unmistakeable silhouette on the far side of the parking lot. Even in the dead of night he still stood out as the blackest thing on the block, with only his eyes showing through the veil. They caught a glint from the streetlamp above him. Before Marinette could even form a coherent thought, let alone react, the boy bolted.

So, the shadow with green eyes was back after all.

"I'm telling you, I really don't think he's a threat, Alya." On a sunny Tuesday a few months after _Le Jour de L'incendie_ , Marinette sat perched in a hardwood chair in the school library, pouring over her biology textbook in a desperate attempt to catch up on her studies. With the amount of damage left over from that awful day waning, these precious moments of spare time were on an incline. (A barely perceptible incline but an incline nonetheless.) Too bad they had to be used for cramming.

Alya, who was not studying at all but rather messing with the html on her up and coming blog, almost crushed the soda can in her hand. "Not a threat? Are you _high?_ "

Marinette was so exhausted from her nightly excursions in building repair that she did feel a little loopy, but she duly left that information out. "I'm serious, Al. You weren't there. You didn't see how shocked and guilty he looked when he came to. It was like he wasn't even there until that moment." As much as she'd tried to explain it, Alya never seemed to grasp the true magnitude of the difference between the dead 'Reaper' and the new kid. After all, it was mostly intuition. It's not like Marinette had any proof (beyond the fact that he'd saved her life, but nobody else saw that) that this guy wasn't like his predecessors. But that wasn't going to stop her from hoping.

"I don't think it even matters what his intentions are, or whether he was mentally present for the attack," Alya said, and glanced around furtively at their peers at the other library tables before lowering her voice to a tender whisper. "The point is that you got Tikki and he got Plagg. You got Tikki because you're a powerhouse of love and creativity and goodness and… and there is a reason he got Plagg. Y'know?"

Marinette sighed and turned another page of her biology textbook. She wasn't absorbing any of it. "I know."

Frowning, Alya tried to assess the intense look on Marinette's face. "Why do you keep bringing this up, anyway? This is like the fourth time you've brought up this subject this week."

 _Because for the last three months, that boy has been following me on my nightly rounds._

There was a lot of middle ground between 'active murderer' and 'harmless,' and Marinette was starting to feel desperate to know exactly where on that spectrum this mystery boy was.

"No reason," Marinette lied.

.

.

Why was he following her? Adrien asked himself that question every night.

While he was rather good at staying hidden in the shadows, every once in awhile he wasn't quick enough and he was sure that she saw him. But she never called out, or stopped, or gave any inkling of acknowledgement of his presence. Whether that was a good sign or a bad sign was beyond him.

At first, he was mainly going out transformed as form of exercise. While he was on the run he'd decided to never transform again, but all that accomplished was to make him almost lose control when he and Plagg got into a screaming match just outside Warsaw. When they merged during that argument by accident it was all Adrien could do to keep from blacking out again. So he'd started 'exercising.' Transforming and running around for short periods of time. Just to get it out of his system. Destroying a few things here and there. Namely he visited the Seine and fished trash from the river and disintegrated it, because he was scared of being seen, and because he wasn't sure what else he could morally let himself destroy without falling back into that canyon of self-hatred that he'd only just begun the long climb out of. He wanted to be good. He was _trying_ to be good. So maybe that's why he was so taken with Ladybug.

 _Sigh_. Ladybug.

That's what they were calling her now. Some girl had coined the superhero-esque title on a popular 'spirit coverage' blog not too long after _Le Jour de L'incendie_ , and the name had immediately stuck. It was so fitting, too. Ladybugs represented luck and prosperity in western culture, and were attached to overwhelmingly positive connotations. Sometimes she would put little black spots on the mask she wore to hide her identityㅡthe only piece of fabric visible through the veil of unearthly light that covered the rest of her clothes and her hair. Lady luck.

No one felt more more lucky to have her than Adrien.

Meanwhile, everyone was still calling him Reaper. He'd managed to avoid direct contact with anyone while transformed, so far, but he still heard the name as he went about town as the civilian Adrien. On the news, in the paper, on the streets, on the blog he perused daily to see what girl who'd saved him was up to. To say the name 'Reaper' hurt him was an understatement of unfathomable proportions.

He didn't know what he was hoping to glean on the nights when he followed Ladybug on her rounds. Sometimes she was fixing another building he had wrecked, or a statue, or a courtyard, or a garden. With a determined set in her shoulders she would lay blueprints out on the front lawn and pour over them for hours, fixing the damage he had wrought upon Paris brick by brick.

Sometimes she would set out after a reported possession. The blog would document her movements, and Adrien would find himself slipping away from the smothering silence that plagued his house, hoping for a glimpse of her. On those nights it was always harder for him to stay hidden in the shadows, because although some possessions were meek and short-lived, an equal amount were violent and dangerous. Adrien watched her learning how to use her powers from the shadows, from rooftops and in alleys and behind buildings. He watched her growing. Getting stronger. Getting faster, and smarter, and better. He yearned after her secret.

 _What is the difference between you and I?_

 _What makes you so good?_

 _._

 _._

"Tikki?"

On cue a ladybug crawled out of Marinette's purse as she dropped it onto her desk, and paused next to her open sketchbook, its wings flicking. Ever since Alya had coined the name 'Ladybug,' Tikki had taken to using the titular spotted bug as her dormant form. It was useful for when she needed to take Tikki with her into public as a civilian, and also made it so Tikki could hang out in her terrace garden while Marinette was at school without fear of being seen.

"Tikki, what happened to you and Plagg?"

The question had been present in Marinette's mind for her whole life; it was constantly posed by scholars and touched on by teachers and pondered after with friends late at night when the world was quiet. But ever since the day she met Tikki and that boy, it had been positively burning her from the inside out. It was personal now, and the answer was vital. After another brief wing flick, a burst of light filled Marinette's room and blinded her. When she lowered her hand from her eyes, Tikki's shimmering human form set atop Marinette's desk with her legs crossed, gazing down at Marinette thoughtfully.

"Y-you know," Marinette said, shying away from Tikki's gaze. Even six months later, she was still getting used to the spirit's goddess-like appearance. Sometimes it was overwhelming. "Why did he turn against you four hundred years ago? Before that you guys were like… partners, right?" This was a touchy subject, Marinette knew, and she was treading on thin ice.

"We were more than partners," Tikki finally said. Her round cheeks grew rounder as she pouted, her semi-translucent fingers toying with the hem of her dress. Two strips of light separated from it and became two fish that circled each other in the air above Marinette's sketchbook. "We were yin and yang, Marinette. We were like one. We've been two halves of one whole since time immemorial..."

The accidental slip from the past tense to present tense did not escape Marinette. Perhaps there was hope after all. Perhaps yin had not quite given up on her yang.

"So what happened?" Marinette breathed.

The fish went on circling. "Things changed."

Of course that was not an answer at all, but Tikki said it with such throwaway finality that Marinette decided she could live with that answer for awhile. However, she still had one more pressing question. "Do you think," Marinette wondered, "that you'll ever make up?"

Surprise cut through Tikki's trance. Her eyebrows shot all the way up, and the glowing fish crashed into each other and popped.

"I'm asking because Iㅡ I really don't think Plagg's chosen is like the others this time. He hasn't killed anyone and he hasn't destroyed anything since that first day and he's _nothing_ like the Reaper or any of the others. I don't think he wants to hurt me at all. Tikki, I think maybe Plagg chose someone _good_. Please tell me it's possible," she begged.

 _Please. I don't want to hurt him either, Tikki. I don't think I can._

Shaking off her brief astonishment, Tikki wrinkled her nose down at her own chosen. "So _that's_ what this is about. Listen. You're optimistic and pure of heart, Marinette, and I love that about you. It's part of why I chose you. It's true, that Plagg's chosen is supposed to be your other half, just as Plagg is supposed to be mine. So I can't blame you for thinking like that, especially since his chosen seems uninterested in causing people harm. It's only natural. But," she sighed, "it hasn't been like that in a long time, Marinette. And I have no reason at all to believe that this boy is any different."

At that, Marinette could only frown and pull her sketchbook toward her while she tried to think of a response. Idly she picked up the powder-blue oil pastel and continued shading the dress she'd left half-drawn on the page the last time she sat here. Maybe Tikki was ancient, and maybe she was wise, and maybe she knew far more on the subject than Marinette ever could. But Marinette _did_ have a reason to believe this boy was different. She had about a hundred of themㅡall starting with that flower that he'd plucked from her hair.

And, as fate would dictate, reason number hundred-and-one was to come the very next day.

.

.

The instant he saw it on the news, Adrien knew this spirit was trouble. It was one of _those_ spirits. A violent one. The kind that came around only once a month or so. In most cities the police would take care of quarantining it, or the fire department if it required search and rescue of civilians, or in the most extreme cases, the army. But Paris had Ladybug, so _she_ was the first responder now.

It was stupid to go out transformed when it wasn't dark yet. So he headed downtown as Adrien, keeping one eye on the Ladyblog as he rode the subway toward the battle, and switched to walking once the train went on red alert and shut down. He watched wave after wave of water crash over the city block on video, sweeping Ladybug away.

 _"Some sort of river spirit,"_ the mod of the Ladyblog could be heard saying on the livestream, from her vantage point on some balcony nearby. _"Very violent. Stay away from the area. High risk of drowning."_

High risk of drowning.

Adrien's gut twisted as yet another wave washed Ladybug down the street. He did not like this.

When he finally arrived at the correct _arrondissement_ , the battle had been going on for nearly forty-five minutes. In the few brief glimpses that the Ladyblog's livefeed captured of Ladybug, she was seriously struggling. Sure she could create almost anything under the sun, but that didn't help when the spirit washed away everything she created with tidal wave after tidal wave that crashed down on her with unrelenting force. Adrien didn't have a plan when he burst into the movie theatre that Ladybug had last been seen chasing the possessed woman into. All he knew was that he had a very bad feeling in his gut. That feeling quadrupled when the possessed woman, a six-foot beanpole with dripping black hair, came surfing down the stairs on a wave and headed straight for the front doors, cackling madly all the while. Adrien lunged behind the empty concession stand before she saw him, and then peeked over toward the stairs once she'd exited the building entirely, expecting to see Ladybug giving chase.

The last bit of water finished cascading down the carpeted stairwell, but otherwise, it was empty. No Ladybug. No Ladyblogger. The fear in his gut twisted and deepened.

"Plagg," he whispered underneath the popcorn machine. "Plagg, come here."

The spirit manifested immediately. "Let me guess," he drawled, "we're off to stalk your _lovebug_ again."

"Something like that. Transform me." And whether Plagg liked it or not, the command sent the lanky shadow rushing into Adrien's chest and triggered the transformation that unleashed the full extent of their combined power.

Once the shadow had finished enveloping him, Adrien lunged over the concession stand and went sprinting up the stairs the way the woman had come. When he got to the next floor he heard a distinct, repetitive banging noise, combined with what sounded like someone crying. His adrenaline surged and he sprinted full speed toward the sound, rounding a corner at the other end of the hall to see the Ladyblogger _(Alya, was it?)_ pounding on a closed elevator door.

When he got to her, Alya gasped and stumbled away from him so quickly that she tripped and fell.

It was obvious what had happened. With a panicked growl and a furious punch, his fist rent straight through the elevator door. Water immediately began to spray back at him from the ragged hole. So he forced his other hand through and ripped the sliding door clean off its track, whereupon a roomful of water cascaded out into the hall, a la _The Shining._ A figure of light spilled out with the water as well, coming to a motionless stop just outside the door. Her eyes were closed under the red mask. Automatically, Adrien dropped heavily to his knees beside her, but flinched away before actually touching her.

"D-don't just sit there!" he yelled at Alya, who was still sitting on the other side of Ladybug's limp body, where she had tripped upon his arrival, and was now drenched with water. "Do CPR or something! Anything!"

With her wary eyes still glued to Adrien, the blogger crawled toward the heroine and rolled her over onto her back, then touched her neck for a pulse. "She's not breathing!"

 _"CPR!"_

"I don't know how! I've neverㅡ"

"Sh-shit." Adrien pushed his wet hair out of his face, barely noticing when Alya cringed at the sudden movement. As terrified as he was to touch anyone _(especially her)_ with these deadly hands, he couldn't let her die. He had to do something. "Shit. Move," he said, and despite her obvious fear of him, Alya immediately threw her body across Ladybug's to protect her. "I'm not going to hurt her," he pressed, his tone a thousand percent more confident than he felt. "I know CPR."

After a split second of internal turmoil, Alya closed her eyes and removed herself as human shield from Ladybug's body. She had no other choice than to trust him.

 _Movies lie,_ Adrien thought as he plugged Ladybug's nose, pulled her chin down, and pressed his lips to hers. _There is nothing romantic about performing CPR on someone you love._

The limpness of her body and the coldness of her lips and the absence of breath was terrifying beyond anything Adrien had ever experienced. The image of his mother's lifeless body flashed in his head as he pushed on Ladybug's chest with flat palms to that practiced rhythm he'd learned so many years ago. _Please don't let it be too late this time. Please let this save her._ Tears brimmed in his eyes as he switched to breathing again. No, there was nothing romantic about CPR.

"Is it working?" Alya's voice trembled somewhere near him.

He didn't know, but he kept going. After the sixth round of pushing on her chest, he switched to breathing again, his tempo more frantic with each passing moment. Except this time when he breathed into her, she immediately coughed. She choked and rasped and her chest convulsed, and the water finally expelled itself from her lungs. Adrien lurched off of her at once and Alya rolled her onto her side so she wouldn't choke on the water again. By the time she finished coughing and opened her eyes, Adrien had moved away and was standing against the nearest movie poster uncertainly, giving the two of them as much space as physically possible in the narrow hall.

"A-aal-ya?" Ladybug rasped. "Wha.. happ'nd?"

Alya's face was puffy from crying and she was torn between elation and confusion. She looked up at Adrien, prompting Ladybug to look as well. But by the time her eyes fell on him he was already disappearing around the corner.

.

.

Sometimes Marinette lamented the fact that she couldn't actually speak to Tikki when she was transformed. Sometimes, especially in cases where she was chasing down an errant spirit, she needed advice. Tikki just couldn't give that to her while they were sharing a body. While they were transformed it was as if Tikki didn't exist. But there were other times when Marinette was secretly grateful that they couldn't converse while they were transformed together. Because Tikki was something of a mother hen, and she would without a doubt have words to say to Marinette once they got home regarding the thing that Marinette was about to do. Later, there would surely be an argument about this between spirit and chosen. For now, Marinette had free reign.

On an empty, wet backstreet, Marinette stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. One palm gathered rain as it fell, and the other clutched her failed attempt at conjuring an umbrella to shield her from the unexpected downpour. In the midnight rain Paris glowed crimson and gold and deep, rich periwinkle, the light of the city painting the stormclouds above as an landscape of rolling rainbow gray. The light of Marinette's transformation similarly reflected onto the spray of raindrops around her, flecking droplets into sparks of short-lived light as each one splashed onto the sidewalk.

"I know you're there," she said.

When after a moment there was no response, she slowly turned to look behind her. The street was as desolate in that direction as it was ahead of her. Thunder rolled and the empty street flashed white. "No use pretending you're not there," she called out after the rumble had retired into the distance. "I'm going to climb the fire escape down this alley and rest for a minute. You should follow me."

With that, Marinette turned down the alley and kept her word. The ladder was slippery, but after a quick tug it came loose and descended low enough to where she could grab hold and climb up to the first grated landing. A quick look back at the beginning of the alley revealed a shadow slinking into the light. Lightning flashed again but the light touched only his eyes, defying physics.

"Come on up," she called down, and climbed the next ladder to the second landing.

This time when she looked at the ground, he was standing under the fire escape that stood directly opposite the one she was on, attached to the neighboring building. Instead of climbing hers he began to climb that one. Apprehension bubbled in Marinette's blood as he climbed, but it was overwhelmed by her curiosity. Clutching the failed umbrella to her chest, Marinette succumbed to a brief shiver. Her clothes were drenched and even though it was summer and the rain was warm, the wind chill up here was starting to get to her. After a minute he finished his climb and drew level with her, across the way. With his arms at his sides he stood waiting. Watching. It was hard to tell through the veil of rain, but it looked like there may have been a thin cloud of steam rising above him.

"I want to talk," Marinette offered. It had been six whole months now since _Le Jour de L'incendie,_ and the olive branch was long overdue. "Will you come over here, please?"

The shadow didn't move. He didn't speak.

Marinette pursed her lips. This was going to be rough, wasn't it? Even if he didn't want to hurt her, it was entirely possible that he hated her guts. "Please," she insisted, and with a wave of her hand conjured a long plank of wood to serve as a bridge between her landing and his. "I just want to talk. I promise I'm not going to hurt you."

The boy, who'd been gazing down at the plank of wood cautiously, snapped his eyes back toward her. "Isn't that my line?" he said incredulously.

An involuntary smile tugged at her lips. So the boy was nice _and_ funny.

With a great deal of trepidation, he stepped out onto Marinette's impromptu bridge. She couldn't help but notice that he moved like a cat, in perfect posture with long graceful strides. Ever since he saved Marinette from drowning last week, Alya had taken to calling the boy _Chat Noir_ on her blog, as a play of words off Marinette's own title. _(A ladybug's yang_ would _be a black cat, wouldn't it?)_ When pressed for her reasons, Alya admitted that it just felt gross calling him Reaper after what she'd witnessed. While it was better than Reaper, at first Marinette had disliked the connotation of the new nickname. But watching him now as he slunk across the narrow bridge, Marinette decided that the name was a smooth fit.

When he got to her side of the alley, Marinette slid into the corner of the landing so that there was a healthy five feet of space between them. There was definitely steam rising from him, she observed, though it was hard to tell where the flickering shadow ended and the steam began.

"Aren't you afraid of me?" he said quietly.

Marinette shook her head. "No. I know what you did last week. The girl that was there told me all about it. That means you've saved my life twice now, so why should I be scared of you?" The green of his eyes reacted like fire to the light of her transformation, shimmering like gemstones on his black, unseeable face. She wished his eyes weren't the only part of him she could see. With that shadow covering him so thoroughly she couldn't even tell what color his hair was, let alone read any of his facial cues or body language. It was like he was standing behind a brick wall. Today she was going to tear that wall down.

"Because I'm me?" he answered, incredulous once more.

"Yes," she agreed. "And you're not like Plagg's previous chosen at all, are you?"

His eyes widened. "N-no. No, I'm not. At least I don't want to be. You…" He frowned at her. "You like the rain?" he wondered.

Marinette followed his eyes to the unopened umbrella in her hands. She must look like a wet dog, she realized, with her drenched hair plastered to her face and her dress sticking to her legs in a way that was obvious, even through the light that covered it. "I couldn't figure the umbrella out," she admitted, although she could almost hear Tikki saying _don't show weakness to an enemy._ "The unfolding mechanism is far more complicated than I thought."

"Oh. In that case…"

Marinette froze on instinct as he inched toward her, but he seemed almost (if not more) wary than her. His hand rose between them and he looked up. Curious, Marinette followed his gaze, and watched as the small steam cloud above him spread to cover her as well. As it passed over her, the raindrops ceased to touch Marinette's skin. There was a brief moment of confusion as she processed the sudden switch from being pelted with rain to feeling nothing at all. All around her the rain carried on, but the two of them stood in a rainless pocket, as if a glass dome had descended on them. _Oh_. Understanding washed over her. He was turning the rain into steam! Such a benign use of the power of destruction would never have occurred to herㅡnot in a million yearsㅡand the sheer naïvety of it struck her to her core.

"Thank you," she whispered, and was dismayed to realize her heartbeat had sped up. Why? Was she scared again? _Please, not now, I'm making so much progress._

"You're welcome," he whispered back. Their little air pocket was so poised with electricity that Marinette had to wonder if they were about to be struck by lightning.

 _You're staring._ Marinette cleared her throat and tore her eyes from his.

"You know," she said, "you should consider showing a little more of your face when you're transformed. It would make you less threatening."

He cocked his head at her. "I don't think I can."

"You don't know till you try. It was sort of hard at first to control what the transformation looks like, but I'm sorta getting the hang of it." She pointed at the silk mask she wore over her eyes. "That's why I wear this, and don't let the light cover my face. It's blinding if it does."

"...Huh. Give me a sec." His eyes grew squinty with concentration, and the shadow that covered the lower half of his face began to smoke and swirl. After ten seconds or so it parted away from his face in a puff of liquid darkness, revealing a patch of ivory skin underneath. Mesmerized by the display, Marinette jumped when he addressed her. "Is it working?"

If she thought his eyes were humanizing, they had nothing on his mouth. He'd managed to push enough of the smoke away so that it looked more like he was wearing a mask, like her, and the difference it wrought on his face somehow made Marinette's heart speed up even more. _Why?_ she wanted to yell at her blood pressure. _He's not a threat! Calm down!_

"Yes," she squeaked. A grin twitched on his lips, but then it softened back into a serious thin line. "I don't understand you at all. You're so… _not evil_. Why on earth were _you_ chosen by Plagg?"

A heavy emotion flashed across his face. "Bad day."

"Huh. Must have been some bad day." She folded her arms and considered him, still taken with the new visibility of his face. Tikki was going to murder her for this later. "Look, I know I told you to leave Paris, but I'm actually glad you came back." Ignoring his gobsmacked reaction, she plowed on. "Historically, Tikki and Plagg were partners, and their chosen likewise. I know they've been enemies for four centuries, but before that was thousands of years of partnership." She knew he knew this, but she felt like she had to say it aloud. "You're _obviously_ different from Plagg's last dozen chosen," she pressed, "and that feels important. It feels like…"

"Like we could actually get along?" he offered.

She smiled. "Yeah. So what do you say?"

He went from almost-grinning to blinking at her in abject confusion. "What are you proposing, exactly?"

"Well…" Biting her lip, Marinette walked her fingers along the wet railing of the fire escape. Her cheeks warmed as she explained, "It would be nice to have someone to watch my back in battle."

"O-oh! _Oh_. You want to _ally_ with me?!"

"Is that crazy?" she wondered.

"Yes! I mean no. I meanㅡ" He combed one hand frantically through his hair. "Wow, I never expected this. You seriously trust me enough for something like that?"

"I trust you enough to give you a chance," she said. "As long as you listen to what I say when it comes to certain things. People hate you, but if you're as noble as you seem and that attack was really all Plagg, then I aim to fix that." People would hate her too, at first, for putting her trust in him. But she had already chosen this and there was no turning back.

"I'll do _anything_ you say, Ladybug."

Those words sent a little thrill through her chest again, and she was starting to suspect that the sporadic pounding of her heart had nothing to do with fear (which was a scary thought in and of itself). "Then I think we have a chance at making this work," she smiled. "Partners, then, _Chat Noir?_ "

He blinked at the name, then at the hand that she had extended toward him. He raised his, then lowered it again, then looked at her uncertainly. She met his gaze steadily. She knew exactly why he was hesitant, and that was why this handshake was so necessary. It wasn't just the age-old symbol of commenced partnership. It was a show of good faith. A display of the fact that Marinette was not scared of him.

She would touch the hand that had brought the Eiffel Tower down in ribbons of rust. She would trust him with her life, because there was no middle ground when it came to him and her.

When still he hesitated, she took a step toward him and took his hand herself. Only then did he meet her eyes and curl his warm fingers around hers. As Marinette gave his hand a single, solemn shake, something incredible happened. For the first time ever, a full, unfiltered smile broke across his face. It was like watching the sun come out. It was a kind of smile that affected his entire face, crinkling his eyes at the corners and dimpling his cheek and spreading so wide that his upper and lower teeth no longer touched. It was unmistakable; the boy was nice and funny _and_ handsome, and he had a positively destructive smile. In that moment she decided that she would do just about anything to see him smile like that again.

Pleased at her reaction, the boy's grip on her hand grew a little bit firmer and the smile brightened even more. Any brighter and she might go blind. Marinette's heart hammered on harder than ever, and this time she knew it was not fear which fluttered madly in her stomach. It was _definitely_ not fear.

"Partners," he agreed.


	8. Curiosity

In which the years have been good to Nino. In which I identify way too much with Adrien as usual and Nathalie is maybe based just a tiiiny bit on my oldest sister (the age difference between us-7 years-is more or less the same as the one between Adrien and Nathalie in this fic). Love u sis. 3

SORRY this took so long to come out. (Two months, oh my god, at me: why are u like this.) I may or may not have become recently obsessed with Voltron, don't kill me, I'm not abandoning this fic lol it's my favorite one I've ever written by far so I'm definitely not abandoning it. Still chugging along folks. Not only that but I just, had a lot of stuff going on. A lot. But the next chapter won't take nearly as long to go up. This one was a toughie. The next one… let's just say it's been in the works almost since the beginning ;) Also is it just me or are these chapters steadily getting longer and longer…

If you're enjoying this story, pls consider leaving kudos/review/etc. I normally don't ask but this story is taking SO much more effort than stories normally do for me, and isn't garnering nearly as much of a return. It's just smidge disheartening. Finding the motivation to continue gets a little harder with every chapter. To those that consistently review, pls know that you are _literally_ keeping this story afloat. I love you. I looove you.

* * *

 **[Curiosity]**

* * *

"So. Any reason you called me for this and not Alya?"

In the uptown studio rental where all the magic for _Créativentures_ happened, Marinette sat perched atop her desk with a notepad on her lap, facing Nino where he lay sprawled out with a ukulele on the couch that she'd installed for her four part-time employees. They weren't here now. It was after 5pm, and all around Marinette and Nino were silent spectators; mannequins in various states of dress with in-progress designs that had all been put on emergency halt while Marinette decided what to do.

"You're my best friend too," Marinette defended. "I've known you way longer than I've known Alya and I don't need a reason why I called you and not her. Stop trying to weasel out of this and help me, you lazy sack."

A bark of laughter escaped Nino while he shifted into a more upright position and rested the ukulele on his knee. He'd known Marinette for almost sixteen years now, and no matter what she said about it he knew there was a reason she called him for this instead of Alya. Granted, Alya was at work right now, but he was sure Marinette had arranged for this meetup to conflict on purpose. The only question was: why?

"Okay," Nino said. "I'm up. I'm paying attention. Pros and cons. Hit me."

With a great big sigh to preface the incoming monologue, Marinette tapped her stub of a pencil on the top of the page where she'd split it first into two columns, then four sub-columns below. _Gabriel_ : Pros/Cons, then _Converse_ : Pros/Cons. After meeting in person with Gabriel's secretary and discussing the proposition, Marinette now had to choose between taking this six month stint with Gabriel and selling that shoe design to Converse. She couldn't have both. It turned out Gabriel wanted her to use that viral floral design somewhere in her collection for the show; in fact it was part of what appealed her to him in the first place. _New-age indie style,_ Mlle. Sanceour had called it, and explained how the brand was attempting to expand into that genre to appeal more to millennials. It was _"all the rage"_ Mlle. Sanceour had needlessly explained, using air quotes.

Twelve year old Marinette would have heard that ultimatum and chosen Gabriel in a heartbeat. Hell, even twenty-three year old Marinette would have done that. But twenty-four year old Marinette was conflicted.

"Converse Pros," Marinette read aloud. "It's a one time deal, so I'd get a fat load of cash while only parting with a single design, which I can then use to fund the expansion of _Créativentures_."

To emphasize that bullet point, Marinette gestured around at her workshop in general. It was a cute but cramped space, flooded with mannequins and supplies and with barely any natural light coming in from the lofty windows, shelves stacked floor to ceiling with drawers of supplies, and rolls of widely ranged fabric shoved in every interval, filling out every last inch of available space. The desk spaces for the part-time employees had been crammed two into each corner, back to back, and lay cluttered with tools and supplies. It was home away from home, but it was long overdue for an upgrade. She needed that money.

Not only that, but, "I would also get publicity and exposure, and people all over the world would see and wear my design. I wouldn't have to work under the man who destroyed my best friend's life. I wouldn't have to see Adrien again." She paused here, before going on, her grip on the pencil tightening until her knuckles turned white. "Cons," she moved on. "It's a one-time deal that benefits me only once and never again. I wouldn't get to work with my career inspiration, or have my actual clothing designs be forever connected with a worldwide reputable brand. And…" The back of her heels kicked restlessly against the frontside of her desk, and the sound echoed back from every crevice of the cramped, cluttered studio. "And I wouldn't get to see Adrien again."

Her gaze flickered to Nino to gauge his reaction. Now he had the headstock of the ukulele pressed to his lips in thought, but aside from a slight furrow to his brow, his face wasn't yet betraying any thoughts or opinions on the matter. If it was Alya, she'd already be jumping on the couch and hurling her thoughts about like a mace.

With a quick adjust of his glasses, Nino cleared his throat. "And for Gabriel?" he prompted.

"Right." The handwritten list in her lap taunted her. As if this quandary was really so simple that making it into a list would solve it. "Gabriel Pros. I get to work with the man who inspired me to go into this profession in the first place. Since it's a six-month engagement I'll get to work with many other people who are high up in the industry, and it concludes with a _show_ , which I've never been involved in before. And it's not just any show, either, it's _Vol_ _d'Automne_. I know you don't know or care what that is, but it's a _really big deal_ , Nino. Me getting invited to participate in this is like.. Like that time you opened for Daft Punk in Sicily. I'll get way more exposure than I ever would selling a design to Converse, and if I play my cards right, people all over the world could be wearing my clothes after the show. It's without a doubt the safer of the two options. And I'll get to see Adrien," she added in a near-whisper.

As if Nino wouldn't hear. He definitely heard, and he was having trouble figuring out which was the bigger issue for Marinette; deciding whether to choose Gabriel or Converse, or deciding whether to work with the guy behind Chat Noir's mask or not. "Cons?" he asked.

Marinette wasn't even looking at the list anymore. Her eyes were glued to the page, sure, but they had glassed over now, and she recited the last bit of the list from memory.

"Gabriel cons," she said. "I'll have to part with the trademarks to way more than just one of my designs, unlike with Converse. But in the long run I could make way more money. Still, I'll either have to hire a few extra people to help run _Créativentures_ or I'll have to completely shut down for six monthsㅡwhich might kill my business. I'll be pinning my success on the hopes that Gabriel really likes me. I'll be staking my future on the man that ruined Adrien's life. And…"

"And you'll have to see Adrien," Nino finished out for her. "I'm catching on. I get now why you called me for this instead of Al. She would've jumped right into convincing you to go with Converse after hearing all that."

Tossing the notepad behind her onto the desk, Marinette slid off onto her feet. Was it worth the bother of refuting that? They'd both know she was lying.

"Here's what we're gonna do." Nino got to his feet too, digging into his left pocket as he crossed in front of the nearest mannequin toward Marinette's desk. As he pulled a closed fist out of his pocket Marinette leaned over it with interest, but then frowned disparagingly when he opened it up to unveil a pile of pocket junk: a crumpled franc, tangled earbuds, and a couple of rusted euro coins. Undeterred by her expression, Nino picked a one-cent from the pile and shoved the rest back in his pocket. "We're gonna flip a coin," he beamed.

Marinette blinked once, very slowly. "I'm going to kick you in the shin," she said.

"Just humor me, okay? Heads for Converse and tails for Gabriel."

"This is an absurd way to make a major life decision," Marinette grumbled as he flipped the coin high into the air before catching it again and slapping it against the back of his hand. Yet despite her annoyance, Marinette felt her heart picking up its feet in anticipation of the reveal. Which side had it landed on?

Nino looked at her expectantly. "Call it."

"Tails," she answered without thinking, and then her mouth fell open in surprise when she registered the implication of her answer. Nino quirked an eyebrow at her. His hand still covered the unrevealed coin. "Jeez," Marinette muttered, completely mortified by what he'd just tricked out of her. "Dissect me, why don't you. That was really underhanded, Nino."

"Yep," he said, and his amused, shit-eating grin suddenly softened into something a lot more kind. "My mom did that to me back when I was trying to decide whether to take that bangin' scholarship in London or stay here in Paris with you guys, and pursue music instead. As soon as that coin went upㅡ" His smile flickered and he flicked the brim of his baseball cap, almost like he was flicking away the _what ifs._ If only she could borrow that strategy. "Soon as it went up," he said evenly, "I knew I wanted to stay."

"Right," Marinette sighed, and leaned tiredly against the front of her desk with her hands coming to rest on her biceps. "Well, which side did it land on anyway?"

"Doesn't matter," he shrugged, and shoved the coin back into his pocket without ever showing her. "You already made up your mind."

.

.

Nathalie had a key to Adrien's apartment, but she only used it when he slept in past his alarm and missed the beginning of the weekly board meetings. Today when she pushed open the door to his flat and stepped inside, it was to find Adrien was awake and frying something in the kitchen, with his phone pressed between his shoulder and his ear handlessly.

"Seriously, though, I gotta run, Chloe. I need my hands." _(Pause.)_ " _No_ , not forㅡ God you're so gross. It's too early for this." _(Pause.)_ "Yeah yeah, love you too, weirdo. Bye. Hey Nat," he called out without turning, and set the phone on the countertop. It looked like he'd begun to get dressed for the meeting but gave up halfway through. He'd pressed some slacks and donned them, yet he wore no socks or shoes, and his lavender button-up still lay untucked at the waist. "Sorry, but I'm not gonna be able to make it to the meeting this morning. Didn't you get my text?"

"Yes, I got it." Reaching past him, Nathalie pulled a mug from a cupboard and set about fixing herself a cup of coffee from his freshly brewed pot. "I didn't come to goad you into going to that stuffy meeting." Not this week, at least.

"Oh. In that case, you want some eggs? I think I made too many."

Nathalie had already eaten, but it was hard to say no when he started puffing out his lower lip at her like that. As Adrien messed around in the pan inexpertly, Nathalie sipped at her coffee. It had been three days now since that ad of his went viral, and Gabriel had been pestering her nonstop ever since. In truth, she was nearly as curious about the circumstances surrounding that impromptu photoshoot as her boss was. Still… Adrien was more of a little brother to her than her boss's son, and she cared about him more than anyone else in the world. But he _was_ still her boss's son. Therefore this was a complex situation for her.

"Adrien," she said carefully, as he turned off the gas on the stove. He made a small noise of affirmation, but was mostly focused on getting down plates and dividing up the eggs and adding two little muffins to the plates from atop the fridge. "About that girl you modeled with. I was wondering, is she a friend of yours?"

This caught Adrien's attention. He froze halfway to handing her one of the plates, his face falling from warm, lazy happiness into a sterile mask. "Did my father put you up to this?"

Guilt flooded her.

"No? Maybe? Okay, yes," she admitted. "I'm sorry. You know I hate when my job crosses over into our relationship, but he is extremely curious about your willingness to come out of retirement to help that girl." 'Curious' was an understatement. "And I have to admit that I'm curious too. After all these years and after all that talk about how much you hated modeling and were never going back, it was a shock to everyone. Are you _sure_ you don't know her?" He had to have some kind of attachment to her. It was the only thing that made sense.

The sterile mask twitched into something even more unreadable. Adrien stared for a long moment, then pushed Nathalie's plate into her hands and took his own around to the other side of the bartop, where he settled onto one of the stools and dug into his food. "I'm positive," he said through a mouthful of scrambled eggs.

Nathalie hummed to herself. Did he think she was born yesterday?

"Fine," she said, and decided to call his bluff. "Then I suppose it won't be of any interest to you that your father just hired her to participate in _Vol_ _d'Automne_.

Adrien, who had just reached out to grab his coffee mug, rapped his knuckles against it instead in surprise, which sent it clattering off the far side of the bartop. It fell into the sink and cracked, spilling coffee all across the counter as it went.

"Mhmm. Thought so," Nathalie hummed.

Adrien peered over the bartop at the broken mug guiltily, then pushed his coffee-soaked breakfast away and rested his face in his hands. His elbows narrowly missed landing in the puddle of coffee.

...Perhaps there could have been a better way to call his bluff.

Feeling tactless and overall bad about the direction this conversation had turned, Nathalie pulled the dishrag from the handle on the oven and swiped the majority of the coffee into the sink, then grabbed the paper towels to do a more thorough job of it. Adrien sat quietly as she worked, only moving his elbows out of the way of her roaming paper towels when she nudged him, never removing his face from his hands even once. When she was finished, she dumped his ruined breakfast into the trash and filled the void it left behind on the bartop with hers.

"I already ate," she said when he looked up at her questioningly.

Adrien sighed and pulled the plate toward him, but it looked as though his appetite had vanished. He gave a quick furtive glance over his shoulder into the living roomㅡwhere his unfriendly cat was lounging in the windowㅡbefore softly asking, "Do you know when her first day is?"

A knowing grin spread across Nathalie's face as she returned to sipping her own black coffee. "Thought you didn't know her?"

"I don't," he huffed, a blush spreading across his cheeks, "but I'd like to. I'd really, _really_ like to, okay? Is that what you wanted to hear? Are you happy? You're such a bully."

Nathalie crossed the kitchen and went around the bartop so that she was standing right next to him, her heels clicking on the tile all the way. The blush worsened into a full-on mortified pout as she took the two halves of his tie in her hands and deftly looped them togetherㅡa familiar over-under-in-out pattern that she could replicate in her sleep by now. _I'm not a kid anymore, Nat, I can tie my own tie,_ was what he would usually say when she did this. But today he held his tongue and let her tie it without complaint. No, he definitely wasn't a kid anymore. He hadn't been a kid since the day his mother died. But still, even after all these years, she found herself wanting to protect him as if he was. "When you're happy," she said, "I'm happy."

.

.

"My… assistant?" Surely there was some kind of mistake.

The dark-haired young man who'd been sent down to the first floor lobby to greet her smiled nervouslyㅡa sincere, toothy gesture that helped soothe Marinette's nervesㅡand nodded. "Yes, Mlle. Dupain-Cheng." He shook her hand eagerly and introduced himself as Cipta, his French round and warm through an upward-lilting eastern accent that Marinette couldn't quite place. Curiosity about where he was from immediately bubbled up but she pushed the question to the back-burner. Business now; besties later. "You look like you're all ready to go," Cipta said. "You can follow me this way to the elevator, then. I'll be providing you a brief tour, and then we'll attend the meeting that will outline the goals and concepts for _Vol d'Automne_. It should last about four hours. Afterward, you'll have a chance to meet and greet the other designers that are participating this year."

Any more excited nodding and Marinette might've evolved into a bobblehead. Cipta crinkled his eyes at her earnestness and stifled a giggle. _Yep,_ she decided as he pressed a hand to his mouth and coughed to hide the laugh, _we're gonna be besties, you and me._

Despite his chill vibe, Cipta's tour was a stressful experience for Marinette. Nathalie Sanceour hadn't mentioned anything about an assistant during any of the phone calls or skype interviews, and though Marinette was not complaining, a surge of Imposter Syndrome creeped into her veins as they walked. But even though Marinette's brain continued to utterly reject the concept of a free assistant, her body followed the crisply-dressed man as he explained which gears of the company turned in which branch and on which of the six stories of the _Gabriel_ company headquarters. The building was wider than it was tall by at least five hundred percent, and Marinette grew more and more anxious as Cipta led her confidently through the labyrinth of corridors.

"We call it Le Sèige, here," Cipta interjected when she stopped to ask a question. "You'll find that your tongue grows tired of the full name of the building before long."

"Of course," Marinette said, watching as a gaggle of middle-aged men and women began to pour out of a nearby conference room, each going their separate ways without a word of goodbye to their colleagues. "You're all about streamlining here, aren't you?"

" _We_ are about streamlining."

"Right," she said. "We." _This isn't a dream,_ she reminded herself giddily, _this is really happening._

Followed immediately by:

 _I am such a fool for taking this job._

.

.

On the topmost floor of the building, Adrien sat on the couch farthest from the mahogany desk, determinedly looking everywhere in the room besides at the man behind said desk. _Hmm_ , that terrarium on the coffee table was new, and had most likely sported a whopping price tag. The humid glass sphere rose two feet off the tabletop and housed several rainbow-speckled plants that Adrien suspected were of tropical origin. He'd have to ask Nathalie if there were billionaire flower shops that sold this kind of thing. He'd also have to ask if his father had specifically requested the most gaudy, show-offy plant imaginable when he'd asked her to fill the space with a centerpiece.

"I have to say that you've caught me by surprise with this request, Adrien."

The sound of keys on a keyboard tittering away filled the room, never slowing. Too much to ask that he get his father's full attention, right? Even when Adrien was offering up the next six months of his life on a silver platter.

"Can I ask why?" Gabriel said, but there was no a question mark in his voice.

On the couch, Adrien fidgeted, pushing at one of the metal studs and tracing a seam on the mauve leather by his leg. "I'm bored," he lied. "Still haven't found a good use for my degree." While that second one wasn't the reason he was up here, it wasn't a lie. With half a degree in philosophy, a third of a degree in sociology, and one half-hearted-but-complete degree in physics, Adrien was at an uncomfortable standstill career-wise. It was easier not to think about it too hard. (Just like everything else in his life.) "I haven't done any big fundraisers in a few months," he went on, still poking at the metal studs on the couch. "I want to donate the paycheck to charity. So will you put me in the show or do I have to go get hired the old fashioned way by approaching one of the designers? Because I can easily do that. But I knew you'd be pissed if I went around you, so _voila_. Here I am."

The keys finally stopped tittering. "No need to employ sarcasm," Gabriel said, and pulled his reading glasses off to set them on the desktop and eye his son thoughtfully. The sky was a checkered wall of blue behind Adrien, shining straight in through the floor-to-ceiling window that comprised two full walls of the corner office, extending from Gabriel's desk all the way to the door. It was true that Adrien was being flippant and dismissive, but underneath the sarcasm was a froth of other much darker emotions that Gabriel had never been able to fully understand.

"Pére," Adrien muttered, his eyes on the terrarium and the sarcasm gone, "don't make me beg. Please, just let me do this."

It was with a much softer tone than before that Gabriel said, "For charity? You've given back enough, Adrien, don't you think? You don't need to keep doing this to yourself."

Whatever Adrien was expecting his father to say, that wasn't it. It caught him off guard and therefore when he met his father's gaze it was with a shocked glare. "It's _never_ enough."

His father simply sighed, returning his glasses to their perch on his thin nose, and just like that the moment passed. Ten long years and their conversations about Adrien's double life never grew less veiled or riddled. If this was any other occasion, Adrien would have shoved the stupid terrarium off the table and stormed out in protest of the fakeness and stupidity of it all. But he couldn't. He needed this meeting to go well, and he was prepared to grovel if he had to.

 _For Ladybug,_ he reminded himself, and his breathing calmed ever so slightly.

With uncanny timing, Gabriel switched gears. "Are you sure this isn't about that Marinette girl?"

"No!" Adrien blurted, then hastily backtracked and attempted to seem less gobsmacked by the very suggestion. _Could you be any more conspicuous?_ "For the last time, Pére, I'm not dating her. This is purely about charity, okay?"

"Alright," Gabriel said, already pulling up his email to fire off a notice to Nathalie. Regardless of the circumstances, he'd been trying to get his son back into the family business since the day he quit and he wasn't about to look this gift horse in the mouth. But he didn't believe for an instant that Adrien's debilitating hero complex was the only thing at play here. The boy could do (and had done a hundred times before) any form of charity work he pleased. Why _this?_ Why return to the career that he had once claimed so fervently to despise?

The answer was clear. And yet all it did was raise more questions.

Knowing Nathalie, she already knew all about this little plan of Adrien'sㅡespecially considering the very convenient timing of this meeting, which Nathalie herself had scheduled to coincide with the first day of the _Vol d'Automne_ season when all the designers were downstairs _._ So the email he sent to her simply read: _Put him in Mlle. Dupain-Cheng's bracket._

The seed of suspicion that photoshoot had planted was beginning to sprout, now, and Gabriel Agreste was not above watering it.

.

.

When the man himself took the podium after the key notes speaker had had his say about the coming season, Marinette's stomach flipped over. It was arduous work to soak in anything he said. Instead all the stories Chat had ever told her about his father kicked up like dust in the back of her mind, clouding everything else, every hurt that her partner had ever suffered because of this man. By the end of the thirty minute speech she was almost in tears. It was not supposed to be like this.

"Are you alright?" Cipta whispered to her as the room filled with applause following the end of the meeting.

"Yes, I'm fine. Just a bit overwhelmed, that's all. Let's go meet the other designers, shall we?"

In the next hall over, which was much more intimate and contained a table of drinks and ritzy hors d'oeuvres, Marinette steeled herself and waltzed right into the mix to introduce herself to the eleven other designers who had been selected to participate in the annual show, each for their modern eclectic styles. She didn't recognize all of them by face, but as they introduced themselves in turn, she found that most of their names had been a part of her vocabulary for at least a few years. Imposter Syndrome reared its ugly head. She envisioned herself stamping on it repeatedly like it was a venomous spider while she sipped champagne and laughed like she belonged. That helped.

"I don't believe we've had the pleasure of meeting yet." It was a miracle she didn't spill her drink on Tyce (perhaps the oldest designer in the room) when she heard Gabriel's voice behind her. "Good to finally meet you, Mlle. Dupain-Cheng," he continued once she hastily turned around.

"And you," she breathed, "you too!" and almost tried to shake the man's hand with the flute of champagne still in hers before Cipta deftly reached in and swooped it away. "It's such an honor to be here, sir," she blabbed on autopilot. All her qualms went on temporary vacation. It was like she was fourteen years old again when she won that hat competition and got to shake his hand for the very first time. "I've been watching the _Vol d'Automne_ shows on TV since I was five years old; I never dreamed I would get toㅡ" The sentence evaporated halfway out the gate when she finally noticed who was standing beside her new employer. It was a good thing Cipta had taken her glass of champagne when he did, because she _definitely_ would have dropped it now.

Adrien cleared his throat and waved at her.

Gabriel watched Marinette Dupain-Cheng, detachedly, much the way scientist would watch a spore. "I believe you've met Adrien," he said. "He'll be participating in the show as well, so you two will be seeing a lot of each other, I'm sure."

Marinette fought the urge to clean out her ears. "I thought you were retired?" she blurted at Adrien without thinking. Was it insane that she was positive she'd seen that exact outfit on Chat before? Could he seriously have put on the _same exact clothes_ he wore the day he quit this career in the first place? Was he really that extra? Maybe it was insane, but she was beginning to think it was possible he put it on specifically to mess with her heart, since that was also the night they first made love.

As if to confirm that yes, he'd done that shit on purpose, Adrien tightened his constellation-print tie and adjusted the collar of his navy button-up as he answered her.

"I am," he explained. "But I heard you were invited to join this year and I saw it as an opportunity to expand your introduction to the wonderful world of science fiction." As he reached for the messenger bag at his side (which she realized was just one more piece of the outfit that he had worn that day five years ago, it was official, he had definitely worn this on purpose) a wry, flirty grin crossed his face.

No. No no no, he was doing _Chat?_ He was pulling the _Chat face_ on her? _Here?_

Well, two could play that evil game! She hardly noticed as Gabriel excused himself to go greet some investors as she crossed her arms. "Nice try," she said, "but I doubt I'll have time to read about space or robots while I'm preparing for this show."

His smile didn't falter by a single watt as he fished a book out of the messenger bag and held it up. "How about a book that tackles both?" _I, Robot,_ it read, with a cheesy 1950's style sci-fi illustration on the cover.

"Whaㅡ for me?" Exactly how many times could a girl withstand being blindsided in one day?

"Yeah," Adrien grinned. "I'm afraid it's not newㅡjust my personal copyㅡbut I thought…" _you would like that,_ he finished internally. Ladybug had always preferred used books over new ones, which he had learned rather early on in their partnership. Something about the dog-eared pages, old library cards, worn book-binding, and forgotten bookmarks entranced her. _My favorite things are the ones I can't recreate,_ she would often try to explain, and he would nod even though he didn't truly understand. Mystery though it remained, it was one more thing he loved about her.

"Thank you," she managed to say after a surreal moment of tracing the message " _Merry Christmas nerd, 3 Chloe"_ that had been scrawled on the inside cover.

And then suddenly she was shaking his hand. "I look forward to working with you," Adrien said, and all traces of flirtatiousness were gone, replaced by a gentle tenderness that made her want to rip her hand away and run.

"You too," she replied, and before she could stop herself added, "and my friends call me Mari."

"O-okay," he stammered. It was somewhat vindicating to know that she'd made _him_ blush for once. "Mari then."

The instant he was gone, Marinette was ambushed. "I can't believe this," Gallia Oliver hissed, her brown curls bouncing as she threw her hands up. "Well that explains how someone like _you_ got into this show, Gabriel's son has the _hots_ for you!"

"So that's where I recognize you from. You were the one in that comeback ad of his, weren't you?" Chev pushed Gallia out of the way to lean into Marinette's personal space, and a few others murmured in confirmation as they too pressed in.

"Can't believe this," Gallia was still parroting. "And to think how hard I had to work to get where I am. You get in like _that_ ," (Gallia snapped in Marinette's face, who then had to fight the urge to slap the hand away) "just because Gabriel's son wants into your dime-store skirt."

This time Marinette did slap the hand away, which had taken her skirt between two fingers to sneer at the quality of fabric. She didn't do it gently either, which wiped the sneer right off Gallia's face. "It's not like that at all," Marinette fumed. "This is only the third time Adrien and I have ever met, so why don't you think before you speak? It's been a pleasure meeting all of you," Marinette said, turning to the rest of the group that had closed around her since Adrien's departure, purposefully avoiding Gallia when she smiled at them all. "I'm sure that our collections combined will be truly show-stopping. I'll see you all at the next meeting. _Adieu_ ," she said icily, this time with her gaze lingering directly on Gallia.

It was only as she made her way to the exit that the adrenaline rush of defending herself began to fade, leaving her with a brand new slush of doubts that threatened to unravel her. The possibility had not even occurred to her until now that she may have only gotten into this prestigious show in the first place because of Chat.

.

.

"Marinette Dupain-Cheng," Tikki giggled, "you are nervous!" The accusation didn't go over well with Marinette, who had been pacing the length of her cluttered studio on and off since 6am, and was, in fact, nervous. "Don't even try to deny it," Tikki went on, drifting across the room through a stack of newly-delivered fabric toward Marinette's desk. "I can tell. This model you have scheduled for today," she said, and Marinette pouted as Tikki leaned in close to peer at the desktop calendar, "he's the one you went on a not-date with, right? The one from your ad?"

It would be suspicious to lie at this point. Marinette just wished she'd had the foresight to prevent this disaster in the first place. What was wrong with her? "Maybe," she admitted vaguely, and collapsed in her desk chair.

The thing about Marinette was that she had always done her fittings personally. It started back in lycee when she used to make things for her friends, and by the time she opened her own shop it had become such an important part of her process that she continued doing it, despite the fact that it was time consuming. For her inventory she kept stock sizes, but _all_ commissions were measured by her own hand. Seeing the subtle unique shapes of a person's body personally was so much better than just looking at a sheet of numbers. So when someone at Gabriel had sent her the spreadsheets on her models' measurements, she had politely thrown it in the trash and asked her assistant to arrange personal fittings for them into her schedule instead.

If she'd _looked_ at the spreadsheet and seen Adrien's name on her list of models, she might have done away with the tradition this time. As it were, all she could do was ask Cipta to push Adrien to the end of the line and plug her ears and hum over the internal hemorrhaging of her brain over the next four grueling weeks until five minutes before their scheduled meeting.

Four minutes now, according to the wallclock.

Tikki popped into her vision upside-down, glowing hair parting around her face as if underwater, stray sparkles dancing into Marinette's peripherals. "You really like him, don't you?"

"Maybe," Marinette repeated sullenly.

"Well don't look so blue about it," Tikki giggled. "I think it's great! I was beginning to fear you would never recover from that disastrous relationship with Chat Noir."

"Tikki, please."

A quick flip and Tikki was upright, her wide bulbous eyes blinking innocently at Marinette from her perch atop the desk. "Oh, sorry!" she said, and clapped one hand to her cheek. "I forget how sensitive you humans can be about break-ups. Really, though, it's long past time to move on. Your heart will thank you if you just lay your feelings for him to rest for good."

Sometimes Tikki could be so callous without realizing it. Fury welled in Marinette's stomach at Tikki's flippant treatment of Marinette's heartbreak, especially in light of what was scheduled to happen in fourㅡthree minutes. "Is that how it worked out for you?" Marinette snapped.

Tikki blanched, as if Marinette had slapped her. A shocked silence followed.

Causing such an expression to befall her spirit made Marinette regret ever being born. "Iㅡ wow, I'm sorry, that was so rude. What's the matter with me? I'm sorry, I'm just stressed."

"It's okay," Tikki whispered, and with barely a flicker of light she transformed into a ladybug and crawled underneath the nearest book atop the desk.

Marinette's heart dropped out. "Oh, Tikki," she sighed, and then flinched halfway out of her seat when a knock sounded at the door. Her head swivelled toward the sound, and she saw a tall shadow beyond the frosted glass where she'd painted the word _Créativentures_ herself in gold leafing on the outside. "Come in!" she squeaked. Crap, Tikki was still here! She often stayed around other civilians in her ladybug disguise unless Mari specifically asked her to leave, but this was Chat. _Chat_.

"Hello, Mari," Chat said, poking his stupid maskless head inside her shop. "Here for my fitting," he grinned. "Wow, this is a lovely office space."

"Oh, you know," she rambled, "it's small and humble but it's home away from home."

"Well I love it. This place makes my father's office look like a stuffy old prison cell. It makes _my_ office look like it was decorated by a toddler."

For a moment Marinette fumbled the measuring tape as she was digging it out of the top drawer of her desk. The urge to see what that office of his looked like was suddenly overwhelming. What would it be like to visit him there, she wondered? To have lunch together, to chat like the old friends they were without any complications at all… These days, they hardly spoke when they were together as Lady and Chat. It was just too _complicated_.

"Uh." _Better shut down that thought process before it gets out of control._ "Let's get this over with, shall we?"

She had to spend half the time kneeling on the ground around him and half the time standing on a stool beside him and scooting it around to reach his shoulders and head. And she tried to get into Work Mode. Honestly, she did. But it was _absurdly difficult_ when her hands were all over his freaking body. In their line of workㅡtheir hero workㅡshe was accustomed to touching him on a regular basis. But this was different. It reminded her of the times when they had touched for reasons that had nothing at all to do with heroism or spirits or anything save for the two of them and what they wanted. The times when his body had been free reign for her hands, and hers for his. He would concentrate and push that smoke away from his skin wherever her hands were, so she could see the smooth ivory there, the contours of the muscles, each faint freckle on his arms, the trail of fine hair down his chest…

"Mari," Adrien said softly, and Marinette flinched out of that dangerous spiral. She'd frozen with her tape stretched from the nape of his neck down to the small of his back. How long she'd stood like that was anyone's guess.

When she retracted her hands she pulled them all the way to her chest, but that didn't stop them from shaking. Slowly, he turned, and as he did the light from the window behind her caught in his eyes, on his cheekbones, in his hair. With her on this stool they were exactly level. And she wished he hadn't turned, because when she looked into his sunlit eyes she saw a question burning there, and this time it had nothing to do with identities or spirits or life or death. It was something simpler, and yet so much more complex. Something human. _Do you still love me or not?_

It would really be easier if she didn't.

Then, his face contorted with shock. "H-Hey!" he barked, and Marinette was so startled she almost fell off the stool, only for him to steady her with both hands before sprinting around her. When she stepped lithely off the stool and wheeled around, he was all the way across the room. Banging on the window. And she thoughtㅡshe wasn't sure but she _thought_ ㅡthat she saw black cat vanish from the outer sill.

"S-sorry about that," Adrien blurted, and when he turned he looked so shaken that Marinette knew beyond a doubt she had not been seeing things. "I'm allergic to cats?" _Plagg_. Against her will Marinette's eyes gravitated toward her desk, toward the book where Tikki lay hidden beneath, no doubt listening to their conversation with increasing interest. Adrien started to follow her gaze but tore himself away before his gaze actually settled on anything. "If you're all done with the measurements, I have to go. Sorry. I'll see you later, Marinette."

.

.

Halfway down the street outside _Créativentures_ , the black cat jumped out from behind a mailbox and made a figure-eight around Adrien's feet. Adrien sent a kick flying at him but it went straight through the cat and set Adrien off-kilter. Growling under his breath, Adrien ducked into the nearest shopㅡan athletics supply storeㅡand made his way toward the men's bathroom. Once he'd ensured that the only stall inside was empty, he hissed out, "Plagg!"

The shadowy spirit manifested directly behind him in the mirror, as if out of some horror movie. "That was uncalled for," he drawled.

Adrien wheeled around, sending a punch flying at Plagg despite the fact that it wouldn't land. The fist went through Plagg's face and the spirit stared, unimpressed, as Adrien huffed and sent another. "You can't just drop in on me unannounced!" he scream-whispered. "We have an agreement! If everyone sees a black cat following me around they're going to start to suspect something."

"Uhuh. You're just mad that I saw you." His mouth stretched into a sinister grin, and his black eyes squinted with what could only be described as amusement. "You were getting real chummy with that Marinette girl. If you ask me, I think maybe Ladybug finally has some competition."

Adrien flushed. Panic took the reins and stopped him from sending a third useless punch at Plagg's stupid smug face. He could not have Plagg looking twice at Marinette. A night from five years ago flashed in his head: a ghost of a memory that plagued him still, sending him gasping into wakefulness from the sickest, blackest nightmares.. _A dark room. Ladybug sleeping soundly in a large, soft bed, and Plagg. Standing over her. Looming. Reaching._

It was not just a phobia; it was a memory.

"If you think I'm over Ladybug," Adrien spat with all the venom in his blood, "you don't know me at all. I will _never_ stop loving her, no matter how you wish I would."

"Sure," Plagg deadpanned. "If that's so, then why, pray tell, were you giving that designer the Ladybug-look?"

"I wasn't. My heart belongs to my lady and no one else." _Forget Marinette,_ he prayed. _Please._

Then Plagg was alone in the dimly lit bathroom.

Truth be told, he hadn't cared all that much before today. He just liked to mess with Adrien, and he also hated being in the dark about Adrien's life, because like it or not, the kid was his sole connection to the physical plane. And that was where all the fun stuff happened. But now Adrien had piqued his interest. What started as a fleeting touch of attentiveness had evolved into a burning curiosity. This was a mystery now, and death loved mysteries.

.

.

Marinette locked up early that day. There was no way she was going to get any work done after that meeting with Adrien. As she set the alarm and adjusted her bag higher onto her shoulder she heaved a long, cleansing sigh and sat down on the top step to gather her thoughts before the long trip home. It was then that she saw it.

Directly across the street, staring at her through the cars and pedestrians, never wavering or flinching as Parisians passed it by, was a little black cat.

* * *

.

.

Prepare yourselves for the next flashback chapter. Only two flashback chapters left to go, and they are both going to slay you. Also pls tell me if I left any typos or smth in the last two scenes. I wrote them in one sitting and posted without really editing because this chapter had been sitting in my drafts for FAR too long. So yeah. Haha.


	9. A Fireless Firefly

LONG TIME NO SEE I posted this on Ao3 but forgot to post it here sorry ilu

* * *

 **A Fireless Firefly**

* * *

 _(Seven years ago . . .)_

* * *

Of the infinite ways to awaken from sleep, a rock to the forehead was the worst.

Adrien wasn't even sure what happened at first. All he knew was that he was fast asleep, not long enough to have entered a REM state yet, and then he was waking to a splitting impact on his head that sent him reeling sideways from the partially-upright position he'd fallen asleep in. For a moment he floundered, unable to properly catch himself on the shapeless canvas awning in front of _Les Hauteurs_ , which they'd climbed up onto in order to take a brief break from cleaning up battle wreckage. All he succeeded in doing was waking Ladybug, who had fallen asleep in much the same position on his shoulder. The offending rock rolled between them. Adrien glared at it uncomprehendingly through blurry eyes and a blinding headache. Then came the voices from the sidewalk below.

Personally, he couldn't understand what they were shouting through his disorientation and pain, but if Ladybug's sharp gasp and sharper reply was anything to judge by, they were the ones who'd thrown the rock at him. Adrien pulled his hand away from his forehead, willing the shadow of his transformation away from his hand to reveal the pale skin beneath, in order to see how much blood had come away with it from his head. It was a fair amount. Even as he looked he felt more trickle down his temple. Then Ladybug shoved him down as another rock went flying past them and cracked the second cursive 'e' in the restaurant's neon sign _._

Muttering darkly, Ladybug waved one glowing arm and sent a wave of water rushing off the side of the awning. A series of indignant shrieks from below suggested the wave had landed, and Marinette used the distraction to summon a ladder that would lead them up onto the roof of _Les Hauteurs._

Adrien went up first, per her insistence, and watched her careening up after him from a seat atop the roof of the restaurant. "Another spirit?" he mumbled groggily. "Already?" They'd been cleaning up the remnants of their fight with the last one for three straight days with little sleep in between. Neither of them were in any condition to go up against another violent spirit right now.

"No, no," she huffed, and pulled a few things out of thin air in quick succession. Towel, disinfectant, water bottle, gauze. "Just a couple of jerks. Come here, Chat, let me see your head."

He let her pull his hand away from the split on his forehead to set about cleaning it and stopping it from bleeding. As she worked she huffed strings of complaints under her breath, and when she dabbed it a little too roughly, he winced away from her. "Nnn. Go easy, LB."

"I'm sorry," she said, and pulled his face back toward her with her free hand. "It just makes me so mad! It's been _three years!_ Ugh, I'm doing such a poor job of this, maybe you should just go to the emergency room and get stitches. I think you might need stitches."

"I don't need stitches."

"You mean you don't _want_ stitches," she shot back, narrowing her eyes. Age-old argument, and Marinette saw right through Chat as always. "You and your dumb, stupid..." _dangerous mix of pride and shame. It's going to get you into real trouble someday, and I can only hope I'll be there to patch you up._ "Look," she practically growled, "someday injuries like these will mean nothing to us. I swear by that. I'm still working really hard on learning how to heal. But... I'm not ready to risk trying it out on you just yet. Skin is such a weird thing to create because it has to be perfect or else the existing skin will reject it—"

"Bug," he implored. She was working herself up into a frenzy again. "You don't have to try and heal it. Really. It doesn't hurt all that much anymore."

"Liar."

Adrien frowned as she pulled her hand from his head like it had burned her and furrowed her eyebrows at him. As he tried to analyze the soft tone of that accusation, the fantastic light that usually obscured her clothes from view dimmed, and dimmed again, until all that was left was a fine sheen that clung to her tank top and shorts like glitter, and pooled around a pair of combat boots. It always caught him off guard when she did that. She never gave him any warning, and she _only_ ever did it for him. Only when she was sure they were alone. Couldn't she see the effect those kind of blatant displays of trust had on his fragile boy-heart?

And as her pout stretched on without sign of relenting, it dawned on him. She wasn't talking about his head wound at all.

"...Alright, so it hurts a little," he admitted, dragging his feet on each word. "But it's okay. I'm used to it."

"Yeah? Well that _sucks_ , Chat, and it's not okay at all."

For that, Adrien had no good reply.

After a bit more huffing Marinette finished cleaning and disinfecting the cut, and started to wrap a length of gauze around his head to hold the bandage in place. "I just wish…"

She trailed off as Chat's wispy ears perked toward the sound of her voice. Almost like a real cat. The light of her own transformation often swirled independent of her desires, on whims of its own. She'd always wondered if, in some abstract way, those whims belonged Tikki. But then it also stood to wonder if the whims of Chat's shadows belonged to Plagg, didn't it? The 'cat ears' made of darkness that he wore on his head were a conscious decision—Marinette knew this, because they'd been her idea. It was a suggestion she'd made to him on their second-ever meeting, when they were still trying to figure out how to change his public image into something a smidge more friendly. It had been said in total jest, though, so she almost _cried_ laughing on their third meeting when he showed up wearing them unironically, his chest all puffed-out with pride. Yet even though he formed them on purpose, she knew that he wasn't in constant conscious control of them, the same way Marinette didn't control every sparkle of light that swam across her skin. So what did it mean? How much of the darkness was Chat, and how much was Plagg?

Now this was a rabbit hole she could easily fall down. So she put the troubling thought on the back burner for now as she slowed in her binding and tied it off at the back of his head. She watched as it was half-swallowed by shadow where it flickered between locks of golden hair.

"I wish everyone saw you the way I do," she sighed. She hated that Chat was so accustomed to being despised and distrusted; welcomed it, even, bearing its weight as penance for crimes he had never truly committed. "You're my _hero_ , Chat. You know that, right?"

Sometimes, when she said stuff like that, Chat would grin at her and accuse her of falling madly in love with him (which she would then voraciously deny with a flick on the nose to restore the balance of power). But his ego was a fickle flame. Other times, like now, he would stare at her with wide, fragile eyes that suggested he was incapable of ever believing such a thing. It was enough to give her pause, to set her thinking about him all night long, fearing that she was the only one who ever stoked the flame inside him instead of trying to smother it.

Just when Adrien had finally regained control of his mouth and was about to reply with something profound, Ladybug broke the tense moment with a different kind of smile. A mischievous one.

"Hmm. You know what my friends and I used to do when one of us was having a bad day?"

"Wh.. what?"

"Blanket fort!"

Okay, he was feeling a little whiplashed. "What's a blanket fort?"

Ladybug's mirth slipped right off her face like his confusion was a pair of windshield wipers. She could have cried. "Of all the things in life that your sheltered butt has missed out on, this is by far the most obscene. That's it. That's it! We're making one right now. Get up."

By the time she finished talking she had already left him. So he gathered his wits and scrambled after her, farther up onto the roof, around a series of sharply angled nooks and past the chimney until they were above the heart of the restaurant. "But what about the cleanup? There's still leftover debris as far south as the airport."

"Well, yeah. But you already destroyed all the stuff that was blocking traffic, and I already replaced the glass in all the residential windows." As she spoke she summoned a series of wooden beams in a circle around them, then blankets to drape across them as a makeshift ceiling to block the night sky from view. "The rest of it can wait," she insisted. "You're injured, it's Friday, we worked really hard this week, and I just decided that we're taking the rest of the night off." The 'fort' had now boxed them in completely, and she built a floor for it out of pillows and blankets, then hung a paper lantern from each of the wooden beams. "If you please," she announced regally, and Adrien took the cue to light the candles inside the lanterns, which cast the dark interior of the fort with a warm, homely glow. All in all it took only a few minutes.

Then Ladybug was throwing herself down on the largest pile of pillows in the center of her masterpiece.

"Voilà," she crowed. "A blanket fort. Normally you'd do it in a living room at a sleepover, and just use stuff from around the house to prop it up, but you get the idea."

In the center of the newly erected fort, Adrien turned in a full circle, taking it all in. "This… is… the best thing _ever!"_ he shrieked. This was a blanket fort? Of course it was, it was exactly what it sounded like. So this was the kind of thing that kids did at sleepovers? Wait. He stopped wheeling in circles and bumping his head on the canopy and hit her with a look of wide-eyed wonder. "Are we going to have a sleepover? Is that what's happening right now?" His father would be furious, but wouldn't dare say anything when he knew the subject of Adrien's absence was more often than not Plagg-related. "I've never had one before."

"Yes," Marinette said from the pillow pile, "and oh my god, Chat, that is it. I'm fed up with this 'I live in an ivory tower' nonsense. Tonight we are doing _everything_ you've never done before. So spill. What else have you been deprived of as the son of a wet blanket?"

He sauntered across the lantern-lit fort and sat down on a blanket in front of her as close as he possibly could without actually touching her folded knees with his. "I've never kissed anyone before," he said smugly, and punctuated it with an eyebrow wiggle.

He loved the way her nose scrunched up the fabric of her satin mask when she was furious at him.

"Next thing," she huffed. "Smartass."

"Okay," he purred. "We'll come back to that one. There's lots of junk food I've never tried either. Junk food is a sleepover thing, right?"

"Yeah!" she brightened. "Like what? Anything specific? I can try to make some."

The blanket canopy shifted above them with the currents of the wind, whistling at the cracks as Adrien leaned back on his hands, mulling it over. "I always wondered whether Doritos would live up to the hype, I guess."

A long pause. This time, Marinette didn't even bother injecting all the outrage and indignation she felt about this into her voice. She was a tired girl with limited patience. "I can't believe you've never had Doritos before. Chat, what the heck. What in the _entire_ heck. Someday—I swear to this—someday I'm going to come to your McMansion and fill your dad's bed with Doritos and make him sleep in it."

"I would pay a morally questionable amount of money to witness that," Adrien confessed as Ladybug pulled up the nutrition info on her phone and went to work using it to craft a bowl of Doritos. "Like… up to fifty thousand euros. Maybe more? I might have to dip into my college fund if I had to pay more than that, but I think I'd do it." Thus Ladybug scrapped her first attempt when she started laughing and the chips came out purple instead of orange. Only five minutes later, after the fourth attempt, did she decide the chips were the correct shade of neon artificial cheese dust, and let him pluck one from the bowl to taste-test.

"Well?" Marinette fretted. Chat Noir was chewing slowly. Too slowly. Was that a frown she spied? She grew testy and insisted, "Don't you dare spare my feelings, Chat."

That was enough to release him from whatever guilt had stayed his tongue. "Okay, it's terrible," he cackled, and batted the plastic bowl back toward her so violently that chips scattered out across the blanket. "Is that how these are supposed to taste? Why are they so popular!"

Fuming, mortified, Marinette grabbed one of the chips from the blanket near her and popped it into her mouth—only to promptly spit it back into the bowl. "Ew, no. No. That is not how they're supposed to taste. Stop making fun of me!" she shrieked, and upended the chips that still remained into the bowl onto his lap, rejected mouth-chip and all. "Factory-made foods are so hard to recreate! All those preservatives! Shut up, you mangy cat, I'm gonna make you something way better than stupid dumb chips."

Marinette stuck out her tongue and crawled over to the far side of the fort to begin the process of making Chat eat his own laughter. It was a little tough to concentrate and remember all the painstaking steps and ingredients that went into her father's honey croissant recipe, what with Chat Noir somewhere behind her making little vacuum cleaner noises with his mouth as he went around zapping all the spilt chips, but after another five minutes she was satisfied with her creation.

"Are you done yet?" he wondered. "I'm getting lonely over here. And hungry. Whatever you're making smells good."

"Almost," she sang as she returned to the center of the fort with the plate of croissants. "Just need you to heat them up and we can eat them. And then you can apologize for making fun of my cooking skills."

Adrien took the plate from her and lit a fire beneath his other hand, holding it beneath the plate like a bunsen burner. "The presentation is stunning," he decided. "But will the bite live up to the bark? I'll be the judge of that, my lady."

Growling, Marinette snatched a warm croissant off the plate and practically shoved it into his mouth for him. "I'll bite _you_ if you don't freakin' eat this and tell me it's the best thing you've ever tasted in your life."

While Adrien would not exactly be opposed to Ladybug biting him, the soft flaky masterpiece that graced his tastebuds at that moment would have had him acquiescing to her demands even if the demands had been world domination. He took the rest of the croissant from her, and another one off the plate preemptively. "You win. This is the best thing I've ever tasted in my life."

It was only when the plate was empty, about an hour and half and ten card games later, that Marinette set the games aside for a moment. "Can I check on your head?"

Chat, who had just won a game of Go Fish by a landslide (they'd run out of better card games) and looked smug as all hell about it, reached up to touch the white bandage that was wrapped around his head as if he'd forgotten it was there until now. "Yeah," he said, and banished the cards scattered in front of him back to the void Marinette had summoned them from with one sweep of his hand, then patted the empty spot in front of him. Marinette crawled into it.

As she gingerly unwrapped the gauze and peeled away the bandage, hitting the wound with a wave of crisp cold air, he focused on her face. The crinkle in her eyebrows, the downward twitch of her lip. Gears turning clockwise in her cavernous blue eyes. "Hey," he said gently, and her eyes locked with his. If they got any closer he knew he'd drown. His heart was hammering but he wanted to say this— _needed_ to say what he'd meant to say earlier. What he'd meant to say for two and a half years, now, and always chickened out on. No more. "You know you're my hero too, right?"

A smug little smirk lit across her face. "I know," she said, and she thought that was that. She rewrapped the bandage and was confused when she finished and looked back at his face, only to see that he'd grown exasperated. Frustrated.

Chat? Frustrated? And at _her?_ The mere fact of it was so disorienting that _Les Hauteurs_ may as well have vanished out from underneath her. She hadn't even realized how much she relied on the shape of their familiar banter for stability until Chat missed his line.

"No," he huffed. "No, I mean, ugh." He groaned and raked one hand through his flyaway blonde hair, disrupting the shape of his incorporeal cat ears for a moment as he stared at her with nigh unreadable emotions crossing his face one after the other.

"What?" Marinette squeaked. She couldn't shake the feeling that they'd just gone off track somehow. They were a derailed train, barreling toward a cliff, and she was nowhere near the brakes.

"Listen," Adrien said softly. He needed to get control of this conversation; he was obviously freaking her out. _Just spit it out, you idiot._ "I know I say stuff like that a lot. I know. But the way you always brush it off… I have to wonder if you really understand how serious I am when I say it. How much I mean it. You _are_ my hero, Ladybug. Maybe I save you a lot, but… you saved me first. You saved me when you decided not to kill me."

Chat touched his neck then, willing the shadow away from that place, and Marinette sucked in a sharp breath as her line of sight dropped to the long, clean, hair thin scar that sat on the front side of his neck, just below his adam's apple. She had put that mark there with her own two hands. That was her. Yet, the adoration on his face was totally at odds with the guilt she felt upon seeing that old scar, and it sent her even farther off track than before. "You saved me again when you jumped after me," he continued, "and _again_ when you let me walk free." His words flung Marinette backwards into the memory; cold sprinklers, and fire alarms sounding in the dark. A confused shadow slipping into broken glass and rising again, stronger than before, while rasping out _you should have let me fall._ A walking contradiction.

"But most of all," he said, pulling her out of the memory on a fishing line made of gentle words. The lantern behind Marinette flickered back at her, silver and gold, from the very back of his retinas. Without thinking, she moved toward the light. "You saved me when you gave me a chance to prove I could be more to this world than just another killer. You trusted me before I even trusted myself, and I… I know there's nothing I could ever do for you that could measure up to the things you've done for me, but I'll keep on trying anyway till the day I die. I would do anything for you. I'd move mountains for you, Ladybug." His voice fell to a shaky whisper. "I love you."

The words fired in her nerve endings, propelling her across the last few inches she'd never had the strength to cross. "I love you too," she whispered, and her breath ghosted on his lips...

...and then Chat jerked away.

Marinette's heart plummeted.

 _Oh my god._ Her brain flatlined as she stared blankly at the unfathomable string of emotions splashing themselves like fingerpaint on his face. _Oh my god, he meant platonically. He meant he loves me because we're best friends. I'm such an idiot!_ "Oh my god," she squeaked, "I'm so sorry, I thought— I think I misunderstood, Chat—"

"No, no," he jumped in, "you didn't misunderstand." One arm reached out to her automatically but he retracted it again before touching her, cringing visibly, like he wanted to touch her but just couldn't bring himself to do it. "I do love you," he said, eyes pleading with her to understand, "I love you like _that_ , Bug, it's just that I'm.. I'm still afraid, you know?" He curled in on himself even further, the lantern reflection shrinking in his eyes as he shrank away from her. "Afraid of touching you."

Adrien saw the moment it clicked in her eyes, watching the flood of confidence replace the rejection. "I'm not afraid."

"I know," he said. It was one of the reasons he loved her so fiercely.

The confidence hardened into determination that set his heart racing. He swallowed thickly as she reached across the gap and carefully took his hand, bringing it up to rest on her face. The instant his palm brushed her warm cheek he flinched away, unable to help himself, totally dislodging her grip on his hand. She didn't fight him on it.

The fact that she simply let his hand go when he flinched absolutely melted him. She was so patient. It was clear now that she wanted this, and wanted him the way he wanted her, but she was unwilling to do anything that would make him uncomfortable. God, he loved her.

Carefully, so very carefully, he inched himself forward until there was almost no space left and brought his hand back to her face of his own accord until his palm was flush against her cheek. Delight bloomed on her face as he brushed the bottom of her mask with the pad of his thumb, and turned her skin a brilliant shade of pink as he leaned in with slow but inevitable intent. The first brush of lips was light. Barely there. Even then she was patient, and didn't push him for more. So he pushed himself. He kissed her more firmly, more confidently, slipping his hand to the backside of her neck and leaning into her until their lips moved together in a silent dance, pushing and pulling and leading and following. The bolder he got the bolder she got, until she was grabbing his collar and yanking him closer. It surprised him so much that he inhaled sharply, opening his mouth to hers. Her shaky responding breath ghosted across his tongue, and a moment later, something wet and warm snuck its way in too. Just for a moment. Just a taste, like she wanted to gauge his response to it before going all the way.

Unable to help himself, Adrien peeked at her through his eyelashes. The moment he peeked, his eyes snapped open the rest of the way and he pulled back far enough to speak. "My lady," he purred, "you're glowing."

Her eyes opened too. "You looked pretty pleased yourself," she mumbled in embarrassment. God, was she really that obvious?

"No," he laughed, gesturing at her body which had grown several magnitudes in brightness while they were kissing, "I mean you're _glowing_. Guess I really light your fire, huh?"

Blushing, she shoved him haughtily away. "Yeah well I'm gonna smoke you if you don't quit it." So she really was that obvious! Here Chat was all concerned he'd accidentally kill her even after three years of zero-incident partnership, and yet she was the one who couldn't control her powers in the face of a little kiss. "Will you stop staring at me like that," she grumbled.

"Like what?" His dopey grin broadened.

"Like that," she complained. "Like a lovesick kitten." It was doing unspeakable things to her heart.

"Oh, you mean like this?" His eyes crinkled at her. "Never."

With a frustrated groan she shoved him again, and he fell backward into the pile of pillows and blankets. They both giggled before falling into an amicable, yet somewhat tense silence.

"Um… what now," Marinette wondered nervously.

"I don't know. I've never kissed anyone before so I don't really know the protocol for what happens after."

"Me neither."

"We could, uh…" Hesitantly he opened his arms to her where he was laying on the blanket pile, inviting her into the space beside him. Her eyes widened comically in response.

"Really?"

"Yeah."

Despite the invitation, he was _not_ prepared for the way she pounced into the spot like a dog, curling her legs up toward his and wrapping one arm around his middle, turning her face to his shoulder and letting her black hair fan out over his bicep.

Marinette was a friend cuddler, and it had been killing her slowly to not be able to casually touch Chat Noir in even a platonic way. Touch was her love language. All day long she sat on Alya's lap, rubbed her parents' aching feet after long work days, made Nino give her piggyback rides, orchestrated circular group shoulder rubs with her school friends, even shook the hands of her rivals whenever possible. Touch was how Marinette showed affection, and by god, Chat was going to learn that.

They lay there in silence for a few minutes, slowly accustoming themselves to the feeling of each other, and after awhile Adrien began to idly run his fingers through her hair. She sighed.

"..You like that?"

To a mortifying degree. But all she said was, "Yeah."

"Awesome. None of the other mod—uh—none of my work friends ever let me play with their hair. Not even my best friend."

The sudden and unwelcome mental image of Chat playing with some other person's hair sent a spike of jealousy coursing through her. "You can play with _mine_ anytime you want," she said.

Adrien blinked at the edge to her voice. Was that.. Was she being possessive? The mere idea of such a thing sets his heart hammering in his chest.

"You know what this place needs?" Adrien says after another minute of toying with her soft black hair. "A skylight. I wish we could see the stars."

"Eh. There aren't that many visible from the heart of the city anyway."

Adrien chuckled. "You're right. Out in the country… that's where it's at. I used to love camping out there." He grinned as Ladybug pointed to the ceiling of the blanket fort, pulling little glow-in-the-dark stars out of nothing. "My mom had this tent with a clear plastic ceiling, and we'd always set it up where the view of the sky was unobscured by trees. When you get far enough from the cities you can see our arm of the galaxy stretching across the whole sky, from one horizon to the next. It always made me feel so small."

"My family went camping once," Marinette offered. "My maman and papa woke me up in the middle of the night to point out that a bear had come into our camp, and urge me to be quiet while we waited for it to leave. They about had a heart attack when I crawled over to the flap and started to unzip it for a better look. In my defense, I was only five."

"You _would_ ," he laughed. After that he grew silent and thoughtful, eyes on the glow-in-the-dark-stars above them, and Marinette wondered if he was thinking about his own mother again.

"Ladybug," he said after a long minute. Carefully, yet casually. Carefully-casually. "Have you ever tried to make something that was alive?"

Marinette's jaw fell open. That was a shockingly casual tone for such a _big_ question. She sat on her answer for another minute, plucking a few more glow stars out of nothing to add to the growing collection. The ceiling was beginning to slouch under their combined weight now.

Finally, when she could feel Chat's gaze on her, she dragged the answer out of her chest. "No."

The tone of her voice made it obvious that this was an uncomfortable line of conversation to pursue, and Adrien was too scared to push the subject any farther than the tantalizing foyer anyway. He didn't think she could do it, because the legends were just that. Legend. There was no modern documentation of any of Tikki's chosen creating life from nothing. Adrien doubted she even _would_ if she could. The morals and ethics surrounding such a subject were complex and grey.

But even though he said nothing else about it, she read his mind anyway.

"Chat.." she said softly. "Would you tell me about your mother?"

His breath caught in his chest. She knew about his mother's death, but he'd lied about the date to help cover his identity, and given as little details as possible. Ladybug didn't know that she was essentially the reason he'd gotten possessed in the first place.

"You don't have to if you—"

"No, it's… I want to." He never got to talk about her, and he'd be lying if he said he hadn't daydreamt of introducing the two women in some alternative universe or some other timeline. "She was… she was amazing. She had all these big ideas about life, the universe, and everything. All these deep philosophies that I didn't really understand because I was just a kid. My dad has me learn things that he thinks will help me succeed in life. Maman, she had me learn things that she thought would make me a better person. She's the one who taught me piano."

Marinette frowned at his hands, imagining them creating something beautiful. "I didn't know you could play the piano."

"I don't, anymore," he sighed. "When it happened, we were in the middle of a lesson. She hit a wrong chord and by the time i looked up she was—"

Marinette waited patiently for him to gather himself. He never finished the sentence.

Instead when he picked up again, he said, "She wasn't a saint. She was a complicated person, like anyone else. But she was my mother. I was just a kid, living in a world of rich sociopaths, and somehow even when she wore the same clothes as them and used the same words they did and attended all the same functions, somehow, she never quite seemed like she belonged. Like she was a fish out of water. Or, rather, a bird in a lake."

"Kinda like you," Marinette said sadly.

"Yeah. Like me."

 _Go on,_ his heart was saying. _Keep going._ So he did.

"There was this one time, when I was ten. She took me on a surprise backpacking trip across Sweden. She just picked me up from a lesson one day and we left. We rode our bikes and carried everything on our backs and it was just me and her, for two straight weeks. It was weird. Good-weird. I had never been alone with just one of my parents for so long before, and for the first time I started to see her as a person, as opposed to my parent. One night we were stuck in the mountains when it started to pour. I mean _really_ pour. It went from light gray skies to a waterfall all at once and our packs soaked through before we found a safe enough place to make camp, out of reach of the lightning. We had to cross through this rising river to get to higher ground and i fell. Had to unbuckle my pack or I would've drowned, so I lost it to the current and…

"I remember crying as we fought against the wind to put our tent up. It was really scary. It was dark and cold and we'd just lost half of our food and gear, and then suddenly, a strong gust of wind ripped the biggest part of the canvas right out of our hands. I just stood there in total despair as it flew away. And then my mom shouted at me to go get it. I looked at her and she was still struggling with the poles, trying to find a way to get them to stay in the soaking wet ground. I was freezing and terrified and I could barely even move, and my mom just looked at me and shouted again. 'We have to keep going,' she said, and I…" Adrien sighed, his arm tightening subconsciously around Ladybug's waist. "I'll never forget that."

 _What are you doing? Go after it, Adrien! We have to keep going!_

It wasn't a choice, he'd realized in that moment. It didn't matter how tired or cold or scared he was. The show had to go on. They needed that tent. And somehow Adrien found the willpower to move his legs. He stumbled downhill after the flapping canvas, finally pinning it down in a bramble of soaked fallen branches.

"My dad taught me how to think," he said. "But my mom.. she taught me how to act."

"I get it," Marinette said. "She taught you how to keep on going when the going gets rough."

Chat smiled at that, but it slowly corrupted at the edges into a rueful slant that had her leaning back and questioning her entire takeaway from the story.

"Yeah," he said slowly. "Of course, when we got back home, I found out that she hadn't spoken with my dad about the trip at all. She just left him a note, picked me up from tutoring, and vanished. They always fought about what I was and wasn't allowed to do, and I guess my mom got fed up with it and took me on her own."

Marinette was floored at the casual delivery of that information. "What the _heck_ , Chat, that is messed up!"

"Yeah I guess it sounds kinda messed up now that I say it out loud," he laughed sadly. "It's not that simple though. They had a complex relationship. My dad had done something really awful to her right beforehand, which i think is what prompted it."

Marinette was just aghast. Her family had gone through a fair amount of hardships in the early days of the bakery, until it struck success when Marinette was around nine years old. But her parents would never have used Marinette as revenge on each other. What kind of messed up…

"I know what you're thinking," Adrien needled, prodding her with one finger. "Like I said, bug, she wasn't a saint." _I don't want to deify her just because she's dead. I need to remember her as she was. "_ But… she was my mother."

"Yeah, I understand. I'm just struggling to wrap my head around the kind of relationship your parents must have had, that's all."

"We were a mess," Adrien relented, "but we were _our_ mess, y'know? We were broken, but it always felt like one day, the jumbled puzzle pieces that kept us from being a perfect happy family would finally slide into place. But now, one of the pieces is gone. I'd give anything to have her back."

Marinette didn't know what to say. She didn't even know if she should say anything, but she did anyway. "Chat…" she began warily, "I have to tell you something. I lied, earlier. When you asked if I've ever tried to make anything that was alive. Last year I spent a couple weeks trying to make a firefly."

"Really? A firefly?"

He sounded casual still, but the tightening of his grip on her betrayed his interest.

"I don't know why I picked a firefly," she explained. "I was just… curious. I wanted to see if I could do it."

Tikki had been patient and understanding. _Everyone tries,_ she had said.

"I studied up on their anatomy for hours and hours and hours, learning what went where, what they were made of, how they worked, how they lived. I even went out to the countryside and brought back a bunch of fireflies and kept them as pets for awhile in a little menagerie in my garden, and dissected a few after they died. I tried. So many times. Do you want me to show you?" she whispered. In the last thirty seconds the atmosphere of their blanket fort had gone from warm and comfortable to tense and poised, weighted with unreleased energy. An open field in a lightning storm.

"Yes," he whispered back. As if speaking any louder would break the dam.

It took her about twenty minutes to materialize the firefly. Even for something so small, it was so insanely complicated compared to making something like a blanket, or even the food she made earlier. It was like a tiny machine with a million moving pieces.

As she announced the job complete, Adrien leaned in to look at the unmistakable bug in her hand, completely overtaken with awe. "It worked!"

"No, Chat. Give me your hand."

Not yet making the connection, not understanding why she sounded so somber about something so radically magnificent, he cupped his hands together as she tipped the little firefly into it. It tumbled down without a fight, without a care in the world, and landed there on its back, unmoving, its legs barely twitching. Adrien felt his heart falling.

"How come it won't move?" he wondered, jostling his hands in an attempt to elicit some kind of reaction from the dark, unlit bug. "Shouldn't it fly? Shouldn't it light up?"

"Yes," she sighed. "It should."

 _But it won't,_ she didn't say. She didn't need to. She could tell the instant understanding dawned on Chat Noir.

"Ah. I see."

"I'm really sorry, Chat."

He shook his head, fighting back the moisture stinging at his eyes. "Don't be sorry. I'm glad to know that it's not possible. I always wondered and now I know." With an incredible amount of determination, he closed his hand around the lifeless firefly and zapped it into dust with a flash of fire—saw a body in it, briefly—rigid, too rigid, unnatural and bruised and fading to ash, flying away, consumed by the flames—

 _Chat? Chat whats wrong?_

—and came back to his senses staring at his hands, breathing hard. "N-nothing," he replied, waving off Ladybug's concern. "Nothing."

.

.

Later that month, Adrien got home from tutoring to find a book waiting on his desk. It came to his attention right away because Plagg was sitting on his desk and sneering down his nose at it, positively spitting.

Dropping his book bag on the floor he crossed to Plagg and reached through him (much to Plagg's annoyance) and picked up the book, turning it over in his hands. It was old. A leatherbound monstrosity with golden-edged pages and a red silk bookmark attached.

 **[] Cheating Death []**

 _A collection of primary sources from history,_

 _detailing the legend of Tikki and the elusive ultimate creation:_

 ** _l_ _ife._**

The first page of the book read: _Is it possible to raise the dead? Have Tikki's chosen done it in the past? History tells us that not only is it possible, but that it has happened..._

Baring his teeth, Adrien snapped the cover shut again and shared one brief look with Plagg, who looked as disgusted about this development as Adrien felt. Adrien hated that. He hated feeling kinship with Plagg over anything.

This was not the first hint his father had dropped about this (it was more like the thousandth), but it was the first one since the blanket fort night. As always, his father refused to speak aloud, and insisted on these back alley dealings. He was too ashamed to ever admit aloud what his son was. Not even for this. Not even to ask his son for something he so desperately wanted and couldn't pursue himself. If his father would just _ask_ , Adrien would explain why it was impossible, why it could never be, why they shouldn't even entertain the idea because doing so would only hurt them in the long run.

But Gabriel would never 'just ask' for anything. Not when it meant confronting the uncomfortable truth that his son was a monster.

Adrien flipped through the book. It read like something between history and a fairytale, the sources dating all the way back to grainy nineteenth century photographs of cave drawings. The image of a darkened firefly entered his mind and he snapped the book shut again loudly, for the last time. He almost set the book on fire too—the most destruction he can really accomplish without transforming—but then, despite Plagg's goading, he thought better of it.

He threw the book in the trash can beside his desk, and to make certain the point was driven home, he left the trash can outside his father's home office for him to trip over.


End file.
